First Dorsal Interosseous

Josh Lefkowitz

I love the strip of skin between my lover’s thumb and index finger,
the way it loosens slightly as the years accumulate.

She might hate this poem, may loathe it when I leave it
on the table as I bid her adieu with morning-time kisses and dinner plan banter.

Darling, I say here now, while also halfway down the street,
don’t you know I’m going to be there to see it all unstitch,

to watch the first dorsal interosseous (I looked it up) slacken,
the breasts heave and sigh, the facial crease lines deepen?

(The one between your eyebrows: I carved it with my foolishness.
The dimpled cheeks: those were made in much more merry moments).

So, too, do I believe your promised pledge to forge forward together,
even as my stomach slumps and testicles descend to Dante’s depths.

(So, too, have you etched your many markings onto me:
forehead furrows from difficult talks; gooseflesh when our bodies talk).

And thus we sculpt each other into modern masterpieces,
less expensive than the gallery wares, yet infinitely more valuable.

Let these mortal folds uncoil. I am not afraid to age nor die,
so long as we remain entwined. My goal: to one day hold her

eighty-seven-year-old bony hand with the eighty-eight years of mine.

---

Josh Lefkowitz has had poems and essays published in The New York Times, New Poetry from the Midwest 2019, The Canadian Jewish News, Rattle, Washington Square Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Echolocation, Electric Literature, Barrelhouse, Hobart, The Millions, The Rumpus, and an academic textbook by Broadview Press. Additionally, his poems have been read aloud on All Things Considered and WNYC, and printed on the side of a bus in Nashville, Tennessee.

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