Today's poem is by Katie Lehman

Eros
       

I run from him like I ran
the paths of my girlhood,
whipping past all the old trees
who stand for proof

that I was there—
if I look up, he is sure
to vanish
as if stumbling upon a buck

in the wholly empty forest.
If I speak my voice is grass.
I could live and not
love, but what grief would I

spare? The only boy I spoke to
as a girl?—Stephen—
I am not seven, although my slow
womanhood races there.

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Copyright © 2023 Katie Lehman All rights reserved
from Emily Dickinson's Lexicon
Dos Madres Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission