Category: Issue 19

Two Poems

Elizabeth Senja Spackman

Unheimlich (Not at home)

Under your golden hair
beneath the white
you sleep
stone eyed and twitching
Live once and more
Hold me if you must
There’s nothing
here not
for the taking.

---

After the Sex, Simile or Something Like It

I. The beginning

Exactly like when you peel

back a price sticker and you

take some of the surface

of the book or the poster paper

with the adhesive

leaving that fuzzy rough spot

where you can trail your finger

from the gloss to the underneath

Had never loved

with such ferocity

unkempt and belly-deep

wanting nothing but

to be as tawny as

those flesh colored leotards

from modern dance

circa the sixties

smoothing the genitals, breasts

into sexless dolls

II. The fruit

Its translucent color

so alluring and taste and aroma

so gentle and mellow

after admiring feelings

of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft

and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy!

The cardboard sound

of pomegranate skin

as you scrape the ruby kernels

from their papery fascia,

eat them by the palmful

A man bites into his first papaw

catches her eye and

cannot continue

III. The revelations

She says to her

recently come-out daughter

that until Monica, she had no idea

that cunnilingus was something done

outside of pornographic videos.

A quiet moment that does not explain

the finer distinctions between

fellatio, general oral sex, cigars,

what she has been doing in her own apartment

to the sound of the refrigerator hum

these past four years.

She tells him

she told him

because she did not want him

to taste another’s latex

on her labia.

What to say?

IV. The response

When asked at the museum Q&A

for the scariest thing he’d ever done

Bill T looked the young co-ed

straight on

and said it would have to be

opening myself

the first time I let him

pull apart my cheeks

and fuck me in the ass.

or

you see the ballerina,

and all you can think

is How small her boobs!

V. The beginning

Bare-assed and crying

the first blow job between them,

whether beautiful or pathetic

Ten reasons it’s better:

—Don’t have to listen to you slurp your noodles with the same sibilance as your lattes

—There’s no reason to be nice to your father

—I no longer need stare at the ceiling, thinking of polite yet seductive ways to slow that

licking down

—The way you hold your fingers to your thumb and sniff

—

Once when it was different

there was water spreading like a quilt

sand in shoes, on gums and scalps,

a silver shore of wet and light.

In the rock he holds and will not skip

the childish smear of a trace fossil

(not the remains of animals themselves,

but burrows, trails, evidence of feeding).

Planolites, maybe.

Rolls over,

belly up,

as a puppy might say ‘smell me’

Two Poems

Ravi Shankar

Cape Sagres to Lisbon and Back Again

And the promontory, sacrum, cliffs lashed by the waves,
land’s end Europe, howling wind, arrhythmic nets
pulled in by fishermen sharing half a bottle of wine
between them, raindrops the size of olive pits plinking
the clay rooftops, mi amor, minarets of the monastery
an architectural oxymoron not based on any gentility
principle that can be parsed in storm, dolmens jutting
from clay, granite eggs crosshatched with scored letters
in an ancient language—druidic?—the dialogical quality
of history in conversation, the rhythm of faint lines due
in large part to the size of the cahiers, bowls of fish soup
and fado guitar overflowing the cobblestone, lurching
streetcars in parallel fifths, far from the Anglican belts
of hymnal, an irreducible secret, unspun wool, Moorish
palimpsest beneath erasures of Spaniards, Catholic dub
the anti-theatricality of the domestic arcane, presiding
over the gnarled cityscape the one and only begotten son,
whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, a middling
fish peeled from hook by handkerchief and from the boat’s
bottom a checkerboard pattern palpitating like a heart,
the fishermen rowing back to shore, dragging with them
a wet heat in their wine-stained clothes, heavy with salt.

---

Surface Tension

Scarified now but how? When we once heard parades
from windows, swayed in artificially

luminescent reeds under the Brooklyn Bridge,
filled soaked corn husks with masa dough,

glimpsed mouse-deer scamper on wish-thin
legs, called each other mon petit coeur de sucre,

split each other like oranges at the navel,
turning pith to string between wet fingers.

Our realm was the back of doors, ill-lit alleys,
lying splayed out on a lake dock baked in sun

until the impulse to jump. We were gods
caught in a rising soap bubble, arms bare,

upswept scent of sand dune barren as moon
except for us twinned, intertwined, tied

to nothing but in the moment each other.
Where did you go? Suds, not love, evaporates.