Fidelity

By Katie Johntz

What?  Are you pilfering again?
raiding
the icebox?  cheating

on some wife—tempting the sumptuous,
sensuous woman who shelters
on the outskirts

of town?  you
who want nothing
other than not

to be forced—enforced
—not
to be pressured in any

direction? 
want not to be guided
away from the object

of your desires?  I should want
to say, go fuck yourself, but all I can summon is
don’t fuck with me.  you whom I have loved

more than any
massive thing one might compress
into the space

of a coddled
egg container—ramekin—bearing
the cracked dimensions

of my heart.  I have summoned
the memory of your face more times than I have actually
laid eyes on it & the one wears away

at the other.   I am trying to prevent
my imagination from erasing you, —am working
on a retrieval system.  fetch

and carry.  hide the eye
under the lid, the lid
at half-mast—the sound

of the heart from its cage.  hide the tongue
behind the teeth—scurry
around back there.  nestle.  one day I will taste, again,

something as familiar
as my teeth are to my tongue.  a brilliant
familiarity, brilliant

connectivity—& marry it.     
if you want to get
to where you haven’t

already been, you need to be prepared
to lose your bearings.
(—once, just once, you said, yes, this is bliss—here, taste it—this

is the other side, is what luck
feels like—to have leapt
across the chasm.)

About the Author
Katie Johntz is a native of Northern California, now living in Brooklyn, New York.  She is strongly affected by landscape.  A graduate of Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts in Poetry program, her work has appeared or is upcoming in such publications as First of the Month, Mudfish, Psaltry & Lyre, and Sow’s Ear.