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A.H.

Your
initials

carved
on my left forearm

with a razor blade.
Underlined.

That was
the autumn

of 1983
after I’d left

Bernie and Paul’s apartment
in East Lansing.

I chopped up
my right arm

left-handed too.

Showed-up

to my graduate
English classes

the next day
arms wrapped

in white gauze.

Took an incomplete
in Chaucer

and the prof died
soon after.

*

27 years later
looking at

your initials.
Yesterday afternoon

I remembered
touching you.

Other scars,
basketball,

surgery
have faded.

Looks like

your initials
will be with me

for life.
Which is what I wanted

that night
when I was 22

—
Craig Cotter was born in 1960 in New York and has lived in California since 1986. His poems have appeared in hundreds of journals in the U.S., France, Italy, the Czech Republic, the U.K., Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, India, and Ireland. Books include The Aroma of Toast, Chopstix Numbers, and After Lunch with Frank O’Hara.

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