Takes One to Know One by Catherine Arra

She knows he’s broken, another

fragmented boy grown into a cut-up man.

She recognizes the boyish grin, shoulder shrug,

the shyness masking an armored core.

She smells the layers of longing

how they fill, swell, bind him in a black vortex.

She expects the dark ghost reining

a crazed horse, the storm of wails and want.

It’s true, she smells feeling, especially 

pain turned to rage, how it blood-runs

with nicotine and THC, fires up and

fractures into the constellations of his history.

She tastes it in his kiss,

old hope callused to concrete.

She braces it in his hips,

lets him hammer it down until it shatters.

She sees it in his eyes, how the light pinpoints

to the tip of a sword ready to strike.

She knows

and lets him in anyway.

Catherine Arra is the author of four full-length collections and three chapbooks. Her newest work Solitude, Tarot & the Corona Blues is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2023. Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at www.catherinearra.com