Natasha Rao
Rearview
It made logistical sense to pass through your town
the first night of my road trip. To deflect echoes
of years prior, I wore a dress purchased post-breakup.
Cheers, you said, clicking your oyster shell to mine.
Clear liquid slipped into my lap. Later, in my hotel
room, it felt like the beginning again, wondering
how we might start touching. What was new: your face
when I reached toward you. A fawn collapsing
into the grass. I used to love the way desire transformed
your body when I was near, the way you’d beam look
as you amplified. In the hotel I understood we would
never return to that version of us, even as you sighed
and lifted me to the bed. In the morning, you hunched
in the passenger seat, my belongings crowding the car.
The lake near your house seemed lower than before.
We ate sandwiches on that bench one summer—full,
green days when my betrayal was still years away.
Driving off, alone, I felt the map of me unfurling.
In ten days I would be in California. I wondered
if the new light, when it touched me, would be gentle.
Natasha Rao reads “Rearview”
Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, which was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she has also received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her work appears in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently Co-Editor of American Chordata.