Poems by April Salzano

The Bonfire

You are the place I have never been,
a season whose patient wind touches.
My skin, wakes, finds, protects.
I want to breathe you in,
to let you hold me tight
with those eyes undo the damage
of previous storms.

Before you I was not incomplete, not quite
empty, but never held, never still. The night
we met, you changed me, held me
down until I stopped pretending.
As you pulled off each layer
of my clothing, you stripped pieces of façade,
cast beside the bed that whispered too many stories.
I swallowed like air the voices I could hear moaning
louder than mine. You heard half

of what I said that night. The other
half lay discarded on the floor with the condom
package. You already knew me. Face down,
you felt me come
to the realization that after you, I would never be
able to sustain my act, to pretend I had not
already found just what I had been searching
for. There it was
amidst the bonfire’s orange flames, tangled among
heat that felt just like light. Just like love.

 

April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg, Pyrokinection, Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Rainbow Rose, The Camel Saloon, The Applicant, The Mindful Word, Napalm and Novocain, The Second Hump, Jellyfish Whispers, The South Townsville Micro Poetry Journal, The Weekender Magazine, Deadsnakes, Winemop, Daily Love, and is forthcoming in Inclement , Poetry Quarterly, and Decompression. She is working on her first collection of poetry and an autobiographical novel on raising a child with Autism.