a poem by alex dimitrov

The Composer’s Lover


We had an hour without music.
A nerve brightly turning in a closed room of the mind—

the heart’s black pool, a word that expired into the air
and woke everything.

Your bed slid under an invisible knife.
What happened to us after meeting, when the right note claimed

Manhattan’s May morning like an elegy
already moving through the living?

Today, we are among them. Here to unsettle each other,
to undress beside the piano—elegant and unmistakably his.

Once it has you, there is a mouth
that never releases. A faint circle in a field of rust

hanging on the wall. We are not there.
We are in our bodies.

Like teeth marks in a shirt you once saw falling off him.
The delicate taste of blood that passed between us

before lust, before anyone could forgive us.



"The Composer's Lover" originally appeared in The Kenyon Review.



Alex Dimitrov’s first book of poems, Begging for It, will be out in early 2013. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize for younger poets from The American Poetry Review and the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, and Boston Review. He works at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.