Intimacy Poem by Aparna Eswaran

Yes we had made love,
and perhaps became one
for a fragment
of those splintered orgasms,
escaping in spite of ourselves.
But when she says intimacy,
I think of the times you sat silently
and wiped with the ends of your shirt
the edges of my
red spectacles
as I kept on writing
feigning ignorance
of your presence, the heaviness of which was
its lightness;
that and the roughness
of the skin around your nails
which I grazed and you bit
in assurance, in anxiety,
in memory, in forgetting.