I strained for the socket
as you pulled me,
bare legs against your legs
in the windowless dark. The room,
snuffed out,
could have been no
larger than a freight car,
no smaller than a box van;
we couldn’t tell anymore, the glints
in the shellacked floor, too,
were dulled. This is like death, you said,
always joking. I slid my head
into the crook of your neck
and didn’t disagree.
I didn’t know
what death was like or what death
could be, or if my eyes,
unable to spot the living
room light beneath the door,
would ever adjust.
And you are here with me.
Again, I didn’t disagree.
What did I know about holding
an elbow like a guide across the miles
blacked out before me.
If you were right,
then either one of us
could have slipped,
undetected, from the room.
Your face, blanked
as a sheet, a thigh,
or a wall
I nearly followed.
JANINE JOSEPH was born and raised in the Philippines and Southern California. She is the author of Driving without a License, winner of the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Best American Experimental Writing, Zócalo Public Square, The Journal, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Her commissioned libretti for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco include What Wings They Were: The Case of Emeline, "On This Muddy Water": Voices from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother's Mother.
