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Thomas DeFreitas was born in 1969 in Boston. He was educated at the Boston Latin School, and attended the University of Massachusetts (Boston and Amherst) for two years. His poems have appeared in Dappled Things, Ibbetson Street, Pensive, Plainsongs, and elsewhere. Thomas’s first chapbook, Winter in Halifax, was published in 2021 by Kelsay Books. A resident of Arlington for the last twelve years, Thomas is a member of the Academy of American Poets, the New England Poetry Club, and Arlington’s Bee Hive Poets.

There Is Poetry

Thomas DeFreitas

Tired and smiling,
you stretch your stature
across two cushions of your couch.
I am sitting at one end.

You prop your bare feet in my lap.

With one hand,
I explore.

My touch passes—
delicate, deliberate—
from your heel up to your toes
and back down again.

I notice
but do not linger on
the vestige of a wound,
ghost of a punched hole
made by a metal rod
which, as you had told me,
the doctors had put in your leg
and had measured badly—
so they had to take it out.

There is poetry
in the whispering friction
between my skin
and yours.

— Thomas DeFreitas

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