Christopher Citro

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, forthcoming), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His awards include a 2019 fellowship from Ragdale Foundation and a 2018 Pushcart Prize for Poetry. Recent poetry appears in Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Best New Poets, Pleiades, Narrative, Blackbird, and Alaska Quarterly Review. His creative nonfiction appears in Boulevard, Quarterly West, The Florida Review, Passages North, and Colorado Review. He teaches creative writing at SUNY Oswego and lives in Syracuse, New York.

Calling For One Another When We're Right There

You slicing scallions in another room,
a knife thump against a bamboo mat.
The record comes to an end, the needle
clicks back, and the world comes in.
Sometimes I'll remove a strip of light,
a hair from the corner of my mouth,
and run. Last night tasted toothpaste
in the corner of your lips as we rolled
together on the bed making each other
so violently thankful. How soon after
your breathing reached the deep pockets
of sleep, your long back pressed to me.
The night a sack we tip into, grab
what doesn't slip between our fingers
and push into our mouths so quick.
The plains below, bay trees shudder,
leaves flavoring the wind. Our tongues
tired now, rest in wet caves. The cedar
sprout you lifted from the garden
hours ago, a clot of needles atop a trunk
thin as a twist-tie, roots extending from
a single red chip of mulch like an egg.
Your closed eyes as I try to kiss
your lips and kiss your teeth instead.