Kayla Rutledge

Clichés

If your other girls kissed you good night
I’ll kiss you good afternoon. I’ll write new clichés for you. 

You make me feel like stuck-together ice, like sleeping
through an emergency. When I saw you, I remembered a stone.

Touch me like my skin might turn to the molt of flowers
Call my smallest tooth your soulmate. Baby, 

sing my name new, love me like
a good egg on the dark floor of a water pot.

My heart is a vital organ; yours, too. Together
they could do their jobs.

Did those other women tell you they wanted you?
I want to say something so true you’re afraid to hear it. 

I want to say, 

in middle school, I wrote my first love letter
and left a copy behind in the printer. 

You are the extra copy of that letter
which my mother found and never mentioned

so I would not learn to be ashamed.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kayla Rutledge has an MFA in fiction from NC State University. Originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, she is the recipient of the 2019 James Hurst Prize for Fiction from NC State and the 2020 Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her work has appeared in Fractured Literary, Waxwing, The Santa Ana River Review and elsewhere. She (sometimes) writes poetry.