Ben Kline

Ars Throuple

Roll your lips around his cock, a wet yes descending until I capture the best angle and good isn’t the province of gods. The metaphor
gags too. Relax. Drool for the fun of it. Let his balls meet your chin, the elastic smack reimagining the physics of Whitman we co-authored in grad school and after. We reached an agreement to invite him into our home before he left his ladder husband in San Diego to rent our in-law above the garage. Thursday nights he arrives by nine or not at all, after dinner settles, the malbec breathes ease when he enters through the back, my mouth widens like a pupil, swallowing light, heat, acts of creation pleasing every eye, every curve of flesh, every atom split. I forget his name, his number in your phone. How we are is the simile, and like love, we butterfly. Eaten occasionally, dead usually, quickly we hope, but do not wait.

Rise
because Aaron Smith

I untangle my arms from his, the musk of his pits, the knotted blue sheets. Light tries the blinds, the cold kitchen linoleum stinging my feet. I start the coffee as requested before we fell asleep last night. Before I remembered his pillows are cirrus, not cumuli. Who can dream so prone. Light finds the gaps between the blinds, the machine popping, hissing, insisting heat has answers and reasons I lacked last time, last summer when I left before he woke. Before he texted Why did you leave the cuddles were so nice. I want to be nice. I turn the blinds, light warms my face. I shake the toaster over the sink, wipe the top, look for bread, English muffins, see my sneakers at the door, still tied, wedged off in the fumble of buckles, buttons, a broken jockstrap. One lies on its side, like me right before we finished, his hairy chest a heavy swamp of cooled sweat. Don’t go, I’ll make you breakfast. I want to be nice. The shoe warms my foot. The coffee pot beeps. The door locks behind
me.

The Last Condom

From the steam, my second term Obama era boyfriend claimed showers are for lovers, baths
for the lonely. I held up the last condom from the box, a wafer for caution we forsook
after bottom shelf libations. Decades have grifted my bones, calcifying what all the uncles
dying taught me, their ash and dust. Neither of us could afford Truvada. A meteor
of unasked questions tore the wrapper, ignoring its expiration date, the mylar destined
for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with other trash he refused to name, swirling Ivory
in his armpits twice, insisting he was almost finished, and we were fine, we were making
good choices, the condom expanding with my lust and time refusing to snap back from ash
and dust. My patella clicked when I removed my jeans and stepped in, reaching around
him for the soap, the latex squeaking in his hand. The steam softened us
inside out. Neither of us could afford an apartment with a bathtub.

Frustration

I remove my N95
on the subway, inhaling

pot and urine and people
being people again. We weren’t

the same, those two years.
Our breath and musk, sparks

in this hot metal box
remind us when

I show you
where to enter, to lick

my neck and teeth and yank
my tongue at the root.

You can’t hurt me. You have my permission

to fill my mouth with smoke and piss
on my thigh, my sandaled feet,

soft with loneliness, your hands
dredging crevices salted

by those same years.
Your index slipping

inside, I don’t last
to Columbus Circle,

stumbling up stairs
into an alley, caution

a broken strap, bricks
against my back. I said, Yes

you can't hurt me.
You have my permission.