Love Technique

I entered this city     emeralds on my fingers
your voice as my throating. A spire slips

into the ocean & an orca mother carries
dead infants: five days     five days     five days

I hear. You’re much too young     you lisp through me construction
sight     a browner bourbon     a lusher performance

velvet from 1965. At the club     purple hews
itself to you. Thus     to me     silver thread threading

my hair     your fingernails     this corner by go go
dancers slinking out an olive-water offering.

I drive an I-5 overpass & you choke through me—
what a scene: rainier cherry popping mountains     dripping

skylines. The needle threads vocal chords & you
move through it: five moves     four years     one thousand days

slipping me emeralds from the Puget’s salt
hewing them the year 1989 on repeat. New Order

roils in the sun-soaked streets. I wear your technique
as rain’s latest deluge. You say Genet is my outlaw

but I throat out in fine time     wearing my own
teeth as the emerald song: I ocean this city

its salted voice     silver-threaded you
singing you’re much too young     much too young.

_________
C. R. Grimmer (she/her/they/them) is an interdisciplinary poet, scholar, and lecturer at the UW in Seattle. They host of The Poetry Vlog, a queer and anti-racist coalition building YouTube channel and podcast supported by The Mellon Foundation and Jack Straw Artist Support Program. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in journals such as POETRY and Fence. The Harlan Hahn Disability Studies Fellowship partially funded completion their current manuscript, The Lyme Letters, which has been a finalist with presses such as YesYes Books and Alice James Press. For more info or to connect, visit crgrimmer.com.