Melissa Leigh Gore | Drinking with Bernoulli in Wicker Park

August 2018

Melissa Leigh Gore

Drinking with Bernoulli in Wicker Park

If the earth's crust, edged with clover, opens to receive me tonight, I'll evade it, press its lips instead against what might prove me, burn its mouth on what is still too hot to eat. A hungry spark. You say nuance never gets anybody high, ideal gases or otherwise, but air makes corridors between semi-trucks plodding interstates draw together, fluid space. Kinetics of the beloved, alveolar anteroom of our breath, aperture of our streamline, you just out of reach. What's yours could be mine. You could let me have you, let me pull the dark matter of your body over this doorway, play at disappearing in it. Whatever vinyl and cigarettes you invent elsewhere while rain falls in curtains, I resent it. Desire will knit a scarf around anything it longs to strangle. I rinse my teeth in barley, sidle alongside my appetite, a voltage unrated for this fuse. Conjure myself, assemble a girl in another city followed by a girl walking alone holding her shoes followed by a girl submerged. Bathwater stammers, sucking at my limbs, tightening space between its surface and the tin ceiling. I only want your body, or this city, or everything. To be where pressure evens itself. To satisfy. Or be what escapes alive and continues to burn.

When I read "Drinking with Bernoulli in Wicker Park," I like to joke that it's about the same thing that probably some fifty percent of poems are about (conservative estimate): loving someone who's never going to love you back. But it's also about the space that exists between things: between who we want to be and who we are, between our bodies, between our dreams for the future and reality. Ultimately, the poem is a love letter to desire and all the ways it makes our forgotten spaces electric.

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