CW: sex scene

Sturgeon Moon

By the lake at church camp, Emily asks if I believe in god

and the question catches me off guard. I don’t know, I say 

but her eyes are fixed on the moon spattered water.

She takes off her clothes, leaves them crumpled

in the sand while she swims. I think I love you, 

I mouth from the shore like a prayer. 

From here, she is a silhouette of summer, 

the outline of a secret.

I toss my clothes next to hers like a pile of empty shells

and imagine her fingertips shipwrecked in the gully of my ribs, 

wading through marrow like peach pulp.

When she floats over to me, our bodies part

the buttered moon’s reflection into crescents, 

the lifelines on our palms strand together.

Do you believe in god? I ask her. 

Of course, she says. Her knees grazing mine, sharp

and unforeseen like the teeth of a mooneye.

In the Woods Behind Church Camp

The first girl I ever kissed closed her eyes and whispered, I wish you were a boy. 

Her mouth was sharp and sweet like the pitch pines that surrounded us, their bodies coated 

in needles like the guilt that thistled each pore as my lips traced her slope of collar bone

and I pretended we were trees, callused in gray bark, limbs furled into the mossy floor. 

When fall came, the pines dropped their cones after months of quiet mottling. 

October blanketed all evidence of us. The way her turpentine tongue singed 

through my hip bones, how my thighs sapped with shame and it spored 

through both of us like honey mushrooms. 

But the candied rot of summer lingered 

on our skin, auburned with absence, 

cocooned into my ribs like a bark moth.