Love. Interpretations. One.

Unhinged.
Racing against ones own best time.
A fish hook.

Those are lines running through my head. Each line are bits of what I remember from one poem. And they all include love. All interpretations, wildly different, and unsettling. Love tangled and intersecting with everything else: history, religion, running, fishing? How bizarre. Just as it is so often, so bizarre in life.

Each poem leaves me feeling like I ran several miles with the author, like I experienced the one thing or the many things that might have caused them to write what they did. Every time I read one, I have to catch my breath. They leave me feeling more confused about what love or life is, can be, should be, etc.

Here's the first. Enjoy - I'm off to bed.

Horizontal Geography Lesson
by Ariel Robello

your bed is the edge of the world
where we lie
unnumbered
unhinged
tracing the outline of your United States map

you are determined to know their capitols and order
rainbow quilt of stoic rhombi
how free the coastal states
their furthest seams defined only by volcano and sea

my index finger trails the Rio Grande
its mud bleeding down my chest
your thumb leaves coyote tracks
guides for those that follow

this land is ours

as the politicians sleep through our anarchy
we buy back California for my grandfather
Louisiana for yours
here manifest destiny dare not brand its legend
arrows pointing toward an imagined west
a muted south, a lonely east, a frozen north

all trains are caught still
no freeways flap close enough to wake us
this night reparations are collected in pores
opened by mutual love for a fifty-first state
free state shape of waning moon or twin bed
state with room enough for two