Of Whores and Libraries

1. I am at the sight of the romance that bore you away from me like a horse spurred on by winter wind. Like a whore surveying the street corner where she once hooked men onto her brassieres (black lace with bits of satin), I fold you into the arms of my memory, and remember the corner where you licked me like a cat, the carpet where she first felt your thighs.

The older whore pines for the young prostitute competing for men by the streetlamp. "She is slightly rounder than I was”, the older whore muses, trying not to stare at the shape of her breasts, as she pulls the shawl closer to her body. The air is frigid as a raped woman, colder than snow against your ungloved palm, and you kept on smearing the white into my brown hair – “I am painting” you said, and I laughed.

2. Our love has melted like the snow. I wrote that on the card I gave you for your birthday. We haven’t spoken since then. I called you once, but you never called me back.

I wish that it were snowing outside, that I could press my nose against a cold glass window and pretend it was your cheek, that I could tell myself that the melting white was the color of my sadness, that it too would fade beneath snow-boots and leather-clad feet.

3. The library is sterile, its carpets stained by coffee and mouse-shit, but our love has left no mark. I want to see tears in the chairs where we gently touched each other’s palms, white flowers blooming out of tables (chunks of dead wood) where we kissed, smoke steaming out of the computers where my fingers traced yours over the mouse, as you taught me how to research polling charts.

Library-mates and bedmates - a stereotypical college romance, blander than poems full of "shivering beneath the breeze of memories."

4. Almond blossoms dot brown branches, but I am still stuck in the frost of a love that has yet to thaw. These are the words the whore thought to herself, feeling the petals that chafed between her fingers. Her shawl matched the yellow of their stamens. “I wonder if flowers can cry”, she murmured, as she remembered the nights she had spent with him beneath the branches – it certainly beat the wooden building with mismatched slabs that she had seen the younger whore disappear into, on the arms of two fashionable gentlemen. She savored the saltiness of her tears, licking them like a cat.

As for me, I will get back to my calc homework, where all the questions have a right answer.