CLAUDIA BURBANK

First Love

An uncommon weakness for gardenia
and certain slow passages of music
repeated till the diamond needle dulled.

And the ruby waste of youth
and the tendency to be duped.

my face in the cotton prints she favored -
whiffs of fried fish, talcum, dust. Her rooms

were numerous, tobacco-stained, pocked
with discarded art, white island of a bed
in a page-curled sea of fact-checked books.

Afterwards, she'd read the cards, the dark
cupped dregs, my scarred yellow palm:

you will love in terror, striking what you love,
loving what you strike.