You Don't Know What Love Is
but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river.

How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.

How to start clean.

This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.

Any day now she'll try to eat solid food.

She'll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear.

You know where she's headed, you know she'll wake up with an ache she can't locate and no money and a terrible thirst.

So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube.

Cover me in black plastic.

Let the mourners through.
Kim Addonizio

You Don't Know What Love Is
Kim Addonizio Poet Writer

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