Abstinent
How the body was so coy
about naming what it really wanted.
How the return of the peepers’ wild song
proclaims this visceral season thawed.
How we’d been waiting, stuck
for what we didn’t realize we missed.
An aroma, an agenda,
a stirring under a quilt of leaf rot.
In this bed, skin warms against skin,
the mucky waft of ripening earth.
*
Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Cutthroat, Lunch Ticket, RHINO, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
