On our first two dates, we stood in the dim street, you looking around at nothing, wondering if you should kiss me. Our last date, your lip imprints were so indistinct they could have belonged to an old lover, my mother, a stranger. My insides still unraveled out of habit. I jumped from your gutters to porch-pillars, cross-stitching so violently all my eyes were thrown out of focus. It was sloppy, and when you lifted a hand to bat it down, I’d already abandoned my handiwork. I thought you’d shred it—like all the others—and never think of it again. But when your palm broke the web’s pitiful resistance, my outermost eye caught you twirling its silvery strands a moment too long before they floated off your fingers and sank into the grass.

Jessie Eikmann is an MFA student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She will graduate in December 2019. People will be confused by her inappropriate pansexual poetry. She might hit up Tinder some more.

Photo by Frances Gunn

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