Sublimation

She watches the man as he slices rare beef at his wife’s table,

balances the steel knife in his palm.

Feeling the weight and substance of her gaze returned,

her longing spools out its own story.

Leaving their home she moves carefully,

as if he were not inside her,

their musk not rising like incense,

her tongue not running against the grain of his eyebrow,

his thumbs not twinned over her nipples.

At home, awake,

quickened by the rapture of her own risen blood,

she notes each step of a fly on the down of her arm.