Natalie Bavar | Teasmade

You wear a full-length nightgown to bed and grin as you find your way into my quilted nest—you know the lace trim tickles me, puts my leg hairs on end, but brush against me anyway. By the morning, your butt and breasts are exposed, and the midnight comforts are a roadblock to gooseflesh.

All that fabric just to say you’re softer in the morning, as fluid now as you were in my dream.

I hear the water bubbling at your bedside and take in the fragrance of chamomile and apple blossoms that’s become you. You’ll wake up mock-scandalized, but for now, I enjoy the curve of your stillness, the angle of your limbs—elbows bent and at the edge of dominion, underarm hair uncovered and betraying the box-dye on your head. My view of you is obscured by a burst of hair—your personal fan-brush foreground—and I can see a few stray strands drifting in your breath.

If you’re tickled, damp with saliva, wrinkled from your pillowcase—it doesn’t show.

I want to open the blinds, let the sun cast you yellow, let the shadow of the window frame enclose the crease in your abdomen, let you become dappled. Instead, I go to the bathroom and flush, hoping you’ll think I woke you up by accident.

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Natalie Bavar is a queer, Iranian-American poet who grew up in Brazil and currently resides in Salem, MA with her cat, Dora. Her work explores the familial, migratory, and sapphic, often referencing Ovidian myth and delving into form. She holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University.