Once on the page, you’re slippery like soap that leaps from grasping hands and lands already scrambling toward the drain. Perhaps the pen is to blame, too blunt to trace the detail of your frame. My fingers know your landscape like a trail and sail across the swells of shoulder blades and knees like cutters slip through slowly rising seas, no more a chance that they might lose their way in inky night than in a glaring day. I know the scratchy brushes of your cheek and seek to feel them in the dark so I can rest my hands against your face, my face against your chest and feel you rise and fall beneath my breast like tidal pools that ebb and fill with every trough and crest. So there should be no simpler thing to trace from memory onto page than your own face until I lift the pen to sketch a curve and swerve and make your nose too thin, your jaw too set, your eyes so blank and hard I’m sure we’ve never met and every line I try to follow through becomes the perfect shape for anyone but you.
Ali Fischer