The City of Trust

is open on every side, like a room without walls, without doors, the same on every side, if you can speak of sides when it’s the same. Whenever you meet someone you say there you are, as if you’ve found the person you’re looking for—it’s better in person than over the phone—face to face is better, it’s even better in the same place. When you tell a person what you know she tells you what she knows, it’s pointless to have secrets, who is a person a secret isn’t safe from? We’re attached to each other, pulling in one place pulls in another, pulling on one side pulls on the other side, like a kind of sympathetic reaction—as long as we’re walking toward each other we’re not moving out of the way—it doesn’t even matter if we don’t understand each other. If one of us has an idea everybody says that’s what I was thinking, I think it makes us more thoughtful. Every day we leave the water running for each other, putting our hands on top of each other like a layer cake with nothing between the layers—if you need something different it doesn’t mean you don’t need the same things. Nobody says I’ll get back to you, or I’ll explain later. When you’re tired you find somebody to lie down next to, uncovering your abdomen and enough of your chest so the other person knows everything about you—you’re so close together when you touch her she touches you even more, and then you touch her more, like a gift idea when you give back what’s given to you together with something extra.

Peter Leight lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has previously published poems in Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, FIELD, New World, Raritan, and other magazines.