[Julie Steiner]

This sonnet series was published in the Able Muse Review several years ago. I workshopped parts of it at Eratosphere.

Sensory Integration

1. Color Blind

To you, it’s pink; to me, it’s putrid green.
Shimmery, too! I laugh. It doesn’t matter.
I love your gift—a coat whose hue will flatter
nothing I own. Beneath its gaudy sheen,
it’s warm and luxe. The silhouette is clean
and very chic. My reservations shatter,
their icy daggers melting as they scatter.
It fits. It fits that it’s from you, I mean.

Initially you, too, were not my style.
“No, thanks. We’re so mismatched, it couldn’t last,”
I pessimized. “We’d see things differently.”
“All couples do,” you answered with a smile.
Long married now, our outlooks still contrast.
And still, your rosy worldview’s warming me.

2. Tasteless

“No sign of any bullet holes,” you said
by way of small talk, during our surreal
first date. The pub had managed to conceal
its scars, but not the headline in my head:
Hostage Drama Ends with Gunman Dead.
(One hostage killed, as well.) But Buy One Meal
and Get One Free was such a killer deal.
Free Appetizer, too. So we broke bread—

became companions, in the Latin sense—
eerily alone, where a depraved
psychopath had forced collegiate Greeks
to rape some blondes, with carrots (!), only weeks
before. Our date revived the pub, and saved
you cash. Win-win. Why might I take offense?

3. Imperceptive

Endearingly—disturbingly—you fell
for me, though I kept trying to convey
that I could never think of you that way.
“I like you as a friend,” I used to tell
you, firmly. But you took it far too well:
“I’m proud to be your friend,” you beamed. Touché.
“I’m sorry friendship’s all I feel,” I’d say.
Once, though, you followed that with, "Do I smell?”

This flustered me: “You’re asking if you stink?”
“Not quite,” you laughed. “I’ve noticed when you’re near,
I recognize your smell. I wonder if
it works both ways.” It doesn’t. But I think
it’s lovely now, my best of friends, my dear,
that when you sweat, I never catch a whiff.

4. Insensitive

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” you complain,
resignedly. You know I always will.
You know my scream’s involuntary. Still,
your rushing past, my panic, your refrain—
“I wish you wouldn’t do that”—form a chain
reaction we’ll reiterate until
one of us is dead, and can’t fulfill
the damage-dance our reflexes ordain.

We both feel wronged, although it’s neither’s fault
that someone large abruptly looming near
sets off my decades-old PTSD.
It wounds you that the wounds of my assault
pop open when you suddenly appear;
it hurts me that you’re hurt by hurting me.

5. Tone Deaf

I’d probably be fluent in it now,
two decades since your first impatient “No.”
You laughed, “What for? You had me at hello!”
when I aspired to go beyond nĭ hǎo.
I studied anyway, prepared to wow
you with wŏ ài ní. “What?” Wŏ ài ní. “Ohhh!
I love you, too.” I’d seen your grimace, though.
I xiè xie-ed thanks. That’s all you would allow.

You begged me not to bother anymore.
I lacked your perfect pitch. I’d started late.
Your parents’ dialect was Shanghainese,
not Mandarin. A waste of time. “What for?”
you asked, bewildered. “We communicate.”
But when we don’t, I harbor thoughts like these.

6. Extrasensory

We make a normal couple only in
the sense that paranormal sure ain’t this.
Nothing magic happens when we kiss.
Or not to me. I’m not your psychic twin.
You see and touch and smell and taste my skin
while telling me you’re lost in lust’s abyss.
Asexual, I’ve never dreamed such bliss.
Our comedy of Eros makes us grin

and groan. But our proclivities and quirks
get honored, cherished—even celebrated—
by one another. I won’t ever feel
what you do, and vice versa. Yet it works.
Those famous, flawless matches? Overrated.
What makes our love imperfect keeps it real.