Jamie Tews

South

A humid January day. Everyone at the grocery
is wearing short sleeves, short shorts,
smiling at the onions, the employees.
I’m there to buy cheese, a soft blue,
for later when I go to see a man
whose dad makes wine and taught him to slurp
it through his lips for full-bodied experience.
The first time we had sex, he put a towel
between my body and the bed
and held my cheeks in his hands.
He never washed his hair, and so
he smelled like the January ocean as he came
to lay his body on mine.
I didn’t feel good or bad beside him, just young,
slurping wine like a kid drinking milk at the table,
reciting poems like I was a child learning how to read.
Sometimes I thought about saying I loved him,
putting my tongue on the underside of my front teeth
to form the sound of the first letter, but it never felt quite right,
so I said it to the sunlight distorting his apartment floor,
the coastal warmth that was always surprising on my drive home.
There’s something sweet about an almost,
someone you think you love but can’t articulate if,
or why, or how, and maybe it just feels good,
sometimes, to have another body holding yours.

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Jamie Tews graduated from the MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington in the spring of 2022. She has work published in Eastern Iowa Review, Cleaver Magazine, Chestnut Review and Appalachian Voices, among others.