Our Lungs Fill and Empty

by Christopher Citro

---

Hello. Let's go to the ocean.
It's hours away but you hold me
and I'll hold you and we'll get
our eyes close enough to see
the water in them. Your palms
against the back of my neck.
My dad would wet a cloth,
lay it there on a hot day,
thumb the hose mouth, fan
a spray across the lawn.
I'd straighten my spine, tell
myself be brave and step into
what I wanted. I'd scream
anyway. Our fingers find
their way into each other’s
mouth. We let them in.
We howl around them.
We hold one another while
the neighbor's sprinklers clack.
Your skin like directions home.

---

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His honors include a Pushcart Prize for poetry, a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, a poetry award from Columbia Journal, and a creative nonfiction award from The Florida Review. His poetry appears in 32 Poems, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Christopher lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.

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