at the middle school dance because skin-to-skin was
akin to touching god and everybody was still too bashful
to slow dance with their crush, and probably they all
had the same crush who wasn’t us, and that’s okay
while simultaneously being devastating to accept
except that crushes work like love, don’t they, in that
you can cultivate more than one at a time if you want,
with a bit of encouragement by the right chord playing
during the good eye contact after a pointed joke
gets quipped, and somewhere between wiping our palm
on our jean’s thigh and setting our elbow back on the table
to go again we realized that the next boy is looking at us
like we might be somebody interesting someday, like
our future isn’t ever being his go-steady girlfriend
or even making out after band but he understands we’re
on the precipice of a sort of consummation, this hand
touching hand combat in a dim corner of a cafeteria,
and we, for the first time, are realizing that we’re
about to do something together, which is, slightly, perhaps,
related to what we were hoping would occur when we dressed
up before coming here today, when we prayed for
anything beautiful to remember always, that maybe this
stupid, insignificant moment was going to linger on longer,
sweeter, than any kiss, whether there was tongue or not.