"2.10" by Maggie Millner

2.10

Now and then, I’d get the strange impression
     that she was me. A stab of chthonic recognition

would set off a little spasm in my eye.
     Sometimes from far away I’d spy

her slanted walk or messy hair and every muscle
     in my body would contract. At school,

while my students bent over their exams,
     I’d scroll through photos on her Instagram,

the fabric growing damp between my legs
     where her finger liked to press

itself inside me like a key. An undiscovered
     ancestor. An eidolon. An isomer.

And an uncanny sense of unity,
     to love in her what had always seemed deformity

in me. To yield. To feel the snugness of the fit.
     To turn the lock. To hear the little click.



Appears in Couplets (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2023) 

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Maggie Millner is a 5 Under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation and the author of Couplets, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. Her next book, My Funeral, is forthcoming from FSG in spring 2027.

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