Factography 3: First Love

I used to lick your pelvic
tattoos (tribal) expected
the blue skin to taste
different we were so

nineties like your
alcoholic father who
ran off and the South
American midwife

you were named for
some nights we drove
a borrowed car on back-
roads of White River

Junction everything
was taut then except
those pants which rode
your hips like someone

in a movie hanging on
to the ledge of a building
after they lose their footing
ever, ever, there was no-

where to go except back
over the river or into our
bodies before you vanished
leaving a gift and when

I opened the blue box
there you were rendered
in miniature surrounded
by pills holding a giant bud

of Hindu Kush as a valentine
but you know what? Fuck
you nostalgia the future
will be great or at least fine

pot is legal in some states
now you’re an architect
and it’s been past twenty
years and I can still sketch

that bluish totem tattoo,
the negative space of your
hipbones with ballpoint
from memory this poem

began with the word glory
(rise and shine) until I
erased it and started over
but I remember your hot

breath melting iced window-
glass frost-bitten mornings
to reveal the sun breaking
like a bone over squat

downtown, the funeral
home’s sample headstones,
dawn this contravention this
defiance this transgression

dawn with her perfect
unforgiving early light
this yes body this yours
truly this deciphering

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Erika Meitner is the author, most recently, of Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011), and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her next book, Copia, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2014. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.