Hummingbird
Hummingbird
To this day
she does not know
she was my first
because, by the time
we met, I was old enough
to have learned to lie
with a smile, to deny
with a laugh, to slink away
with silence so that, to her
knowledge, she was little
more than the latest
in a long line. So she behaved
as such, slipping out
from beneath the weight of me
when we were done,
walking to the bathroom,
counting her steps in the blue
glow of the television, light
and some invisible horror crowning her
like charged ions, humming
bird wings.
from the collection “The Seldom Seen Kid”