Sometimes intimacy only means no elsewhere:
that June I dutifully read The Golden Bowl ,

swaying to & from the job on a crowded
Lake Street El, at first bored then repelled

by Adam Verver's incestuous clinging.
Every night I'd tear fifteen pages more,

staple them into a throwaway daily reading
of love's duplicities. Days I wrapped toys

at Goldblatt's, my touch sticky
where I'd glued shut paper cuts or thumbed

snakes of tape around gift toys
while Chicago's impatient moms or dads elbowed

each other into frenzy. On the El-ride
home, Verver bought his daughter an Italian

prince or the shopman wrapped
our novelist's flawed golden bowl into

a symbol, sure to break later.
All around me cramped passengers shook

in & out of pairs; basted with one another's
sweats, they tried not to look at faces,

but I read faces while I used James
to fend off a heavy woman in stiletto

heels as she wobbled in & out of libidinal
balance. Someone behind me wanted to tear

off my shirt. A man cursed in two languages.
Intimacy makes its heat by friction —

some of us just smolder, some burn.