after Linda Gregg

Later, he claimed to not know where I lived,
though I remembered him laid out
the length of the sofa, remembered him
asleep beneath the delicate white quilt
on the bed. He rested his hands on my waist
in that house, bit down on the rest.
We were in Miami by then,
so every thought and touch we shared
was air-conditioned. I thought often 
of his girlfriend. She knew who I was
but had no evidence to prove 
his lies, the only flickering
lights the ones behind his eyes.
Isn’t life a series of messes and cleanings?
Every day I washed the same dishes
and put them away. When I sat
in traffic, I looked over to the cars
beside me and expected to see her face.
If it had happened, if she had pulled to a stop
in the gridlock, rolled down her window
and called me a whore,
I would have nodded. Beneath our tires
the asphalt rain-slicked, still hot from the sun,
wet from a storm missed
by a minute and a mile. How briefly
the body became breathless in that city,
how it held a story in the moments
before the lights turned green.