Alisha Dukelow

After her lover

and every night-club is asleep
she invites him to her fifth-floor
apartment to bathe clothed with her in dead
sea salts and lavender mementoed from
Aix-en-Provence   and they drink
white plastic bottles of Korean makgulli
which he calls moon milk
and claims homesicks him for his
girlfriend who left him for Tokyo

She knows that every night
they do this   they are locationally
confused   that the O of his mouth
as he points out Orion in
greyed-purple flowers
only looks thickeningly true
through things that will thin   drunken
rice   aspartame   steam   illusory
constellations scattered
with the whorl of wrinkled fingers

But her polyester sleeves
swollen in bathwater might
be momentarily buoyant
like the orange water wings that held
her to the sky above the lake
when she was a little girl
aerial   hurtless   wetly
remote but related to how she liquifies
now   When their knees begin to touch   it might be organic

they might not be so far
from the ground   cleansing
back home together   and he might
care to ask her where
she is from   at least until morning
light splinters her apartment open   their bodies
open   and they ache lucid again   their skin
spattered in sogged blossoms
that look like drowned bugs