first love

besides
Roy Rogers on tv when i was 6 (and that
doesn't really count)
it was a
high-school
basketball player
tall + skinny
with a deep
gentle voice
we were lab partners
in advanced biology
we dissected a fetal pig together
+ a huge dull-green grasshopper too
i never said
or did anything
to let him know
i'd have slept with him
in an instant
an all-night camping
trip would've been
perfect  but
this would of course
have meant that
our relationship
went deeper than
a dead fetal pig
+ a big dead grasshopper
i peeled back skin +
muscles  imagined his
zipper his underpants parting instead
labs were odd affairs
his long thin legs folded
beneath the table he'd try to keep
them out of the way
yet sometimes one of his
knees would bang the
underside of the table
+ lift it annoyingly
he always apologized
+ his apologies
were sincere
it's just that
his legs were so long
at night my wet dreams
reeked of
formalin and
sweaty basketball shoes
i chewed grasshopper legs
+ wept for dead baby pigs.

--Carl Miller Daniels (My poem "first love" also appears in my book Gorilla Architecture, published by Interior Noise Press in 2011.  And "first love" first appeared in Chiron Review, issue #64, in March 2001.)