ADORA SVITAK

Verboten

I sit next to you on that grey couch

with the springs beginning to poke upwards

like the green shoots of April.

You put your feet

up on the coffee table. I plate pasta,

red coils on white shining

like Captain America’s shield,

but you go home at night’s end,

like a man who performs paid services:

electrician, plumber, or locksmith.

I love you, but I don’t say it.

In some other world she-who-is-almost-me

and he-who-is-almost-you

lean on each other on that couch,

illuminated by the string lights in their paper boxes

a glowing picture window floating in the dark.

Adora Svitak is a Bay Area-based writer with previous stories, poetry, or nonfiction in Apogee Journal, 8Poems, BUST, Women’s Media Center, and numerous other publications. While at UC Berkeley, she studied international development and South Asian Studies, and took writing workshops with Vikram Chandra, Kaya Oakes, and Joyce Carol Oates. As a poet, she is interested in exploring gender, colonialism, and power within intimate relationships, especially through the quotidian images of everyday life that animate those broader themes.