"I climb over my sleeping boyfriend to check for fires" and "Dialectics"

New Poetry from The Metropolitan Review

Vincent van Gogh, Oleanders, 1888, Oil on canvas

In The Metropolitan Review’s first poems of the New Year, please take a moment to enjoy the intimate moments poet Kevin Hautigan highlights in love and desire even among the realities and imperfections of life in these two wonderful reads.

—The Editors

---

I climb over my sleeping boyfriend to check for fires 

and I stare at the stove I have not touched in months 
all because of a fleeting thought that maybe 
my roommate forgot to lower the flame or that I ambled 
over in some Klonopin-driven haze 
to drowsily turn the knob myself. I allow a laugh 
to leak through clenched teeth—this worry of mine is unfinished 
until it infects all that’s important. Until I become convinced 
that my apartment will crumble despite a foundation 
that has outlived Presidents. 
A friend told me there isn’t a thought I haven’t thought 
to death. He said: I ought to learn 
that only books are bound to last. 
But there is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to libraries 
destroyed. Alexandria’s. Ashurbanipal’s. Where I live 
is a mess filled with battered novels, sweaters abandoned 
over every stool. My drunk roommate snores 
from the auburn couch. My boyfriend’s toned arm reaches across 
my mattress as though he needs me even in sleep. What a privilege 
to have this entire library to lose. How lucky I am 
to love what is flammable and fragile: paper, skin, cloth.

---

Dialectics 

I notice what I didn’t before: 
sweat forming on your back or the pitch 
of your laugh. Where you like to be 
touched and where you don’t. This is what’s offered 
by the time we have now, 
time I don’t know we’ll have again. 
Hegel talked of the negation of the negation. 
A truth’s challenge challenged 
becomes something brand new. I am not 
who I was when I met you. I wanted to talk ad nauseam 
through what you hoped to abandon. We landed 
on conversation that never ended, that danced 
around facts—I mean, look at us laughing 
hysterically in bed. Our bodies bend slightly: 
a pair of parentheses trying to contain some aside, 
something secondary to the point.

Kevin Hautigan lives in New York and has had poetry featured previously in The Common.