I’ve looked at him from behind, while he’s not looking.  His calves are not perfect, slightly misshapen and bowed outward.  But I avoid his face so as to appear indifferent.  I know his back, the part farthest from the front.  If I look there, I am like a piano backed by a singer.  Or a beach backed by hills, always near, but never touching.  If I only imagine his face, I cannot be sunstruck.  But what if, in the night, his face steeps under the door and suddenly I am in his car and can see his herringbone face?  The face that tells me he too looks for me each day.  And when he stops talking, I cover my face, my headstone, my head, my stone.  Because the front of the head does not lie. 

He came back in French class with a leg missing, the pant leg in a knot.  Then he disappeared.  I never cared even though I had used his body for watching.  One night he appears, but looks fatter and older.  He sits on a bench.  Here, I no longer need to look away.  I look for his legs but can’t see them.  Even in a dream, there are frames.  I bend to see if he has two legs, but the border cuts them off.  I climb up the ficus tree to see, but I hit my head.  I walk to the right, but a baby coos and looks at my breasts like they are wet-aged beef.  They drip grease when they see its two front teeth.  The more I walk away, the more of him I can see, but the less clear I become.    

Once I loved a man who had so little body fat, he sunk to the bottom of the pool while I hung at the surface like a plastic duck.  I watched him disappear.  He seemed finally happy, looking up at everyone’s feet.  Somewhere there was a child getting fluid emptied from her stomach.  Maybe that’s why he was always thirsty.  A truck beeps when backing up, as a warning.  A man should come with the same lights and sound.

I never miss my own hands while clapping.  But the High-Fives I give to men never match perfectly.  What if inside every woman’s locket is a picture of herself?