Monica Joy Claesson: “To my Lover in Cusco”

To My Lover in Cusco

You stopped to kiss me by the twelve-sided stone,
then we laughed and you said I’m hiking the Salkantay
tomorrow. I leave in four hours. We kept walking
and I knew, already, how you would become
one of the men I never loved; knew also
how the one who speaks in my poetry always falls
for the men I never loved. When at last we lay in silence,
breathing thin mountain air into each other’s lungs,
I wondered how best to say it: in poems I adore you.