Piercings
Connor Irwin
by Chris Hawkins. This poem appears in Boshemia Magazine: BODIES.
Your earrings were still on my desk,
one week and half after you plucked
each from either lobe and left them
to glimmer in the energy—
safe, inefficient glow which lit
that late-evening, shifting into
early-morning, post-viewing of
a musical you’d somehow not
seen before I illegally
streamed the adaptation online.
Though the next first, for us both, that
followed was a tender, clumsy,
significant experience,
what lingered with me, one week and
half on, was that so simple, so
underrated sensation of
skin simply touching skin as we
mutually, vulnerably
held each other, your unadorned
ear resting pressed on my chest.
Through that night and morning delight,
those lavender stones leant gently
beside my half-drunk water and
silenced phone, so at-home that
reapplying them slipped your mind
when you’d mustered enough will to
leave, and they laid there, content, till,
one week and half later, I popped
them into my coat’s front pocket,
rather sorry to see them go.