Michael Alcée

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First Lesson

We are built
to know closeness
by distance,

say one morning
the razor in the right hand
reaches for the left,

turns the other cheek,
inches off course,
like the dark side of the moon,

how it feels
when a lover knows just
the right distance
to draw your face closer,

what’s hardly touched
burns supernova.

Michael Alcée’s work has appeared in San Antonio Review, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, and Tarry and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Black Iris, Literary Cocktail, Quarter Press, Syncopation, and The Branches. In addition to being a poet, he is a psychologist and author of Therapeutic Improvisation (Norton, 2022) and The Upside of OCD (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).