Sleeping Hot                                                                          —Matthew Rotando


It’s not about infatuation, it’s about how you dream and how I want to learn even that. The way you roll slowly from side to side while you’re falling makes me want to touch your leg. The night is long and cool and I am awake, watching you in the minimal blue. Another little breather breathing into the dark. You might have held onto that last thought for a while, but I saw it leave you when your hands opened. I put my hand on the back of your knee and you grumble, then fall back into the well. I let you drift and feel the depth of our bed, watch the rows and rows of days we’ll spend together unfold out to the horizon. I gather them around me, bigger and warmer than any blanket.


 


Calamities


It strikes me that I was replacing how much I missed you with how much I wanted her. But she was the stand-in for how much I wanted to rescue myself. Like that old sea turtle. I watched her lay eggs in the sand, 85 years old and still trying to save her species, still willing to swim the high seas, through oil slicks and past the ghosts of battleships.



 
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Matthew Rotando sometimes thinks as Cosmo Crixter. He has two books of poems out, The Comeback's Exoskeleton (2008) and Hail (2019), both published by Upset Press. He has poems published here and there, including Oddball Magazine and Matador. He currently lives in Dakar, Senegal, where he is learning to fall off his surfboard in French. 

ISSN 2472-338X
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