With viscous clouds of light
hair-thin on your Vaseline lips.

Pearl-lit sweat through your
ravine hands. This is not half

of the half that I remember:
the kerosene whistle of your skin,

spit collecting in the saw-tooth
of your mouth. Your blue-smothered

eyes. Everything I remember is not
everything I wanted. Nor is it

anything that I did not.
There was black linen dressing

the bed as we sat down, your hand
touching my thigh for the first time.

In the morning, I ground coffee beans,
held a paring knife to the crown

of a honeycrisp. I called you, nameless.

Connor Donovan (he/him) is a mathematics graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a winner of the 2023 Healthline Zine Ekphrasis Contest and his work can be found or is forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Eunoia Review, JAKE, Stone of Madness, the engine(idling, and underscore_magazine, among others.