it's really cold.

by Amy

Falling in Love

with a place is hard to do,
there is dirt everywhere a hand can move,
no space has asked me to be truly clean.

Knowing this I still miss rising
and falling,
in Kentucky I could only truly love

the hills,
truest love I’ve had.
The lover I had in that uncertain place

wasn’t ever ever-present.
Never lined the rearview mirror through fog and later smoke the way the hills did
when I first arrived and when I left for good.

I never told you how I felt
about the hills.
Maybe you would have taken me to see them,

that would have been a desperate measure
speaking up about unreachable things.
Nothing I do now is heated

with the fever, the desperation I had
to touch them one more time before I left.
I did everything all wrong.

I traded water for a boat,
I trapped the sun inside a jar just for when it got cold,
didn’t grow what my love would need to keep rolling on.

Hills with feverish continuity, scaling and then setting just as newly,
in spite of vice for the elements I’d have to succumb to if I had stayed,
is what made me love them best, is what made me go.