It's You, My Catch Twenty-Two
Hurricane Andrew, 1992
Trees fall outside the lobby, but it's silent
in hotel hallway. I hear the rise and subside
of mother's chest and a weeping howl at the window.
It's dark enough to see him approach:
grey skin and purple blood, his body moves
like shattering glass clasping one eye
that calms the storm.
Only three moments before he leaves me
freezing, dilated watching those fiery eyes recede
I must remind myself to breathe
in the softly whooping winds,
the soon-to-be blazing breeze.
He's like deja-vu: that familiar, comfortable--
yet almost always fleeting--feeling
on the edge of my tongue. I feel him
in my fingertips as I raise a glass,
toast this cup of calmness, this shot
-glass of splintered silence. Let him linger
like a lover's lips and leave me
like a towel--getting wetter
as I dry in his angry arms.
Deanna Paul is a New York City attorney by way of Miami Beach, Florida. Though a full time lawyer, she has spent the last three years taking writing courses at New York University's School of Continuing Professional Studies and Gotham Writers and poetry workshops through UCLA Extension, Brooklyn Poets, and Poets House. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot and Drunk Monkeys.
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