Perspiration #82 Claine Keily

She moved
somewhere between
the whiskey and the rosewater
but still she could
not forget
the smell of his perspiration

She did not want to
return to
having to appear to be
a page ripped from
a magazine
so she did not
write to him
she preferred to lose herself instead
in interpretations of text books and
in dreaming of a new career

What she feared was that
if she wrote to him
he would reply so eloquently
that her bond with him
would flourish
and that one day
there would be
a photograph of them both
eating fried potatoes
under a garden umbrella