Boyfriends

I love anything liquid

that calls itself silk.

I love the buttery color

of Hugo's childhood walls:

"Wandering Moon."

I loved him

for choosing this color

for living with this choice.

Once I returned to the TV room,

drugged or drunk and nearly perfect,

and Eric said: 10,000 things happened

while you were gone.

I loved that.

I've loved love: the red-hot,

the unexpected, even the unwashed,

the illicit, with the gearstick

in the way. I have outgrown,

perhaps, that love so eager

to share a toothbrush.

But I treasure all exes,

in fact and in theory,

except one,

the nameless one,

who said I smelled of corn.

It was a good yellow scent,

clean as fresh laundry.

Martin who left oranges,

brown-sacked, on my mini-fridge,

saying, Here—I thought

you might need these.

The German boy,

with the commonest German name,

I fetched bottles of beer for.

The boy from Berck sur Mer

writing long letters

de l'amour et rugby,

who drank red wine

because that impressed women.

And the boy whose inappropriate virginity

was a function

of his dead mother.

The one who flossed his teeth

five times a day,

always for ten minutes

after doing it.

Some boys whose only legacies

are loose sweaters or blue aftershave.

And Steve, my second love,

who accompanied me on the piano

and left me for Melinda.

The many mistakes

I've chalked up to faith

in my own powers of transformation.

Not failures exactly.

Let's call them labors of love.

Melissa Fiori

A translator by trade, Melissa holds an MA in Translation from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her chapbook, The Language of Exile, is forthcoming in 2005 from Main Street Rag. Born on Okinawa, reared in Virginia, she now lives at 8,500 feet in Colorado with her fiancé and their two small sons.