Tame

Rachel Milligan

Throw me for that loop again. The birds
are in the trees, singing noli me tangere.
So, tangere. Tango with my breath, my
teeth. You and your wine-translucent
skin. I’ve got a disease called “some-
day” or “somewhere.” How best to
break open me: think about how small
I am. Wrap one hand completely around
my waist. Whisper something I cannot
hear, that I don’t want to hear. Whisper
gamine fingernails and burrow them in
the soft floor. Tell me the swimming
pool was shallow and clear until I lay
naked in it. You licked something clean
away. Say what it was, I won’t know. The
bed looks how it looks without you in it, like
a burrow. When I get the pieces together,
you’re going to want to hear about it.

Rachel Milligan’s poems and translations can be found in BOAAT, Similar:Peaks::, Pathlight Magazine, smoking glue gun, and elsewhere. She was a Pflughaupt Fellow in Creative Writing, as well as a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholar in Chinese. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she lives in Philadelphia.