"Stick And Poke And Other Poems" by Rachel Valente

Your hand
On my leg,
My eyes
On your concentrated face.
Needle
To ink
To skin
And in
And out
And in
And it hurts,
But I smile—
I love
The shakiness,
The secrecy,
The pinprick painfulness of it all.

I wonder when it will fade.
I wonder if I will want it to.

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"Portrait of my Phone’s Camera Roll" by
Rachel Valente

The curves of his ear,
a clip of her jaw,
his hair from behind,
the side-by-sideness of our shoes in stride.
Their mismatched socks,
overlapping legs,
hands gripping hands, forks, books, mugs, 
(see how these things grip us back)
(we are often afraid of what we can’t hold onto).
Her face framed by the window,
half in darkness, half in bluish light,
like the moon
(this one I took in my mind,
a snapshot I have hung on the back of my eyelids).
So much is
out of focus, off center, over/underexposed.
All awkward limbs and blinking eyes,
funny, weird, and bittersweet.
Paint covered fingers,
freshly tattooed skin,
sleeping bodies like dominoes
(this one leaves an aching want in my chest),
her head thrown back in laughter over a glowing birthday cake.
Parts of themselves they could never see
no matter how they twist in the mirror.
Catch them running,
changing,
moving forward
in all of their human blurriness. 

(Please,
I am just a tourist here,
scraping for whatever I can
before I leave this place I have named after you.)

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Originally from Buffalo, NY, Rachel Valente is currently a sophomore at SUNY Oswego where she majors English and minors in creative writing. She is also a proud bookseller at the River’s End Bookstore in Oswego, New York.