What love is
is not the love I expected, even
before I realized it had blossomed, even more
before you had realized it maybe, but something fun-
house, primal, grotesque, honored, even prouder than
the midday desert sun, lazy in its path, full of swagger going
nowhere in a hurry, self-assured in its purpose, safe to
say the world is your petri dish, ready to grow on all the San
Francisco streets a colony of a thousand memories, Sebastian
said it best, if it be thus to dream, still let me sleep, lest I run
afoul of this fortune, lest I lose what I cannot comprehend, aye
lest the universe remember I deserve less, not the Biarritz
sunburn peeling angrily on my back while in Bayonne
your hands work in the aloe, or —
Zachary Lorico Hertz’s work has appeared in Eulogy Press, Some Words, and Electric Pink.