In Love

By Chloe Martinez

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            After Dorianne Laux


I’m in love with you, coffee, 
and with you, green ink in my pen,
and with you, imaginary reader.
I’m in love with you, recirculated office air 
that gets a little too warm, then 
a little too cold, because now I am 
putting on and taking off repeatedly 
this shawl I got long ago 
when I was a student, 
living in India for the first time, 

and it still smells like incense
in Mount Abu, where the lake 
was named Nakki, fingernail, 
and the surrounding mountains were said 
to be holy fragments of the body 
of a goddess who fell to earth there. 
I was a little in love with her.
I climbed long flights of stone stairs
to visit the mountain cave shrines 
where she accepted flowers, coconuts, and cash. 

Shawl, I’m in love with your pattern of vines. 
Your border that runs wild. I’m in love with you, memory 
of how my body felt then: curious 
and excited, shy and defiant. 
Also you, knowledge of how it feels 
now: sometimes tired, or heavy 
with sadness and experience, 
which are often the same thing, 

but other times, electric, connected 
back to that person. She didn’t 
know much. I wasn’t in love with her 
then, but now I see her better. 
How she stood unsure on a rural road. 
Nowhere she had to be, and the forest 
lush and loud all around her.

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Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College. See more at chloeAVmartinez.com.

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