"With this dance your eyes touch." From today's poem "Rumba – spot turns" by Christine Klocek-Lim. If you have ever danced rumba, you know this is so.

Rumba — spot turns

by Christine Klocek-Lim

She says, look at each other.

With this dance your eyes touch.

I am uncertain as the wind.

His face is an ocean, difficult

to fathom. He cradles my scapula

and I finger secrets against his bicep,

muscle through hard depths to bone.

I don’t know how deep

we can go.

He moves us into a basic, an open break,

then pulls me terribly

close—spot turn with my arm

tangled behind my back

then into an open curve

around his body.

He is steady as waves breaking.

My hips fret until he turns contrariwise,

a rip tide. A tsunami.

I cling, helpless as the sand

trying to walk backwards and he pivots,

spins me off.

I am crushed shells.

Bits of glass.

I don’t want to leave when I’ve just learned

to swim. He pulls me back harder

so I disappear,

the ocean too deep for this motion.

I hold my breath while he unbinds me yet again.

The ballroom slick as water.

His face deep as our first night together.

My body soft as the wind.

* * * * *

"Rumba – spot turns" is from Ballroom — a love story (Flutter Press, 2012).

Christine Klocek-Lim won the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry. When she's not reading poetry for Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, she writes novels (Disintegrate, Who Saw the Deep) and is an acquiring editor for Evernight Teen and Evernight Publishing.