Two Poems

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I Run Hot When I’m Lying Down

As in, the bedroom of the colonial cape arcs over my body with its pitched roof.

As in, I tingle with it.

As in, I am clutched.

As in, I’ve wanted to say this for a long time:

this house—this room—still encapsulates my heart.

As in, you can grab onto a sentence’s commas to

steady yourself like straps in a subway car.

As in, a period makes a room of the sentence,

stakes the paragraph—zippered, meshy, partially open to the stars—

to the earth with a jointed pole.

As in, the poem makes a room of rooms

and when you walk in, I want you to feel what I feel.

As in, the right word emerges.

As in, we are clutched.

As in, the house sits low on the hill, squatting against the wind.

I can touch the ceiling standing on the bed.

As in, my bones thrill

with enclosure. As in, the house is gone

but it crouches in my body still.

As in, I am haunted.

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When I Kissed Her Neck

When I kissed her neck, I smelled her neck and I smelled her house. Neither vague nor

momentary, her scent, inhaled again and again, brought forth each room as if I were walking

through it—glint of countertop, sunlight in swatches, thick carpet, cool tile, smooth wood,

textures encasing my body, my body leading me, until the final room thickened to fruit-flesh—

I’m swimming through it, warm and tart, the walls the rind, the door the slit where I begin

peeling.

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Cassie Pruyn is the author of Bayou St. John: A Brief History (The History Press, 2017) and the poetry collection Lena (Texas Tech University Press, 2017), winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in numerous publications.

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