XXIV
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EARTHLY DELIGHTS
These days it’s like I can only crave aimlessly, blitzed from the day’s beginning to end with the phantom taste of release sitting bitter on the back of my tongue. Consider: motion as habit, men as something I can prophesize & undo. Even kind John, who pays to worship a softer body, presses my head hard into the floor when we fuck for the fifth time. Outside his window, there’s a balcony garden of cosmos flowers in full bloom (but no dragonflies to match) & I smell his candles on my skin the rest of the week. There’s a sense of pride in knowing that I can turn every man into the same ache in the end, & I could say, some things have to be endured, you know, to make the pleasure so sweet, but the truth is that I don’t know how to talk about the flesh without the memory of my lover obsolete staining my neck a faint plum, of cleaning myself out in the shade of the showerhead because he came inside despite my nervous litanies, & being told good girl, good girl, good girl—so tenderly that I believe I am loved, unconditioned. |
THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING
& the first thing A said to me was that I kept them
up all night laughing in my sleep as if I wasn’t
really asleep at all, & the sun was pouring out,
the warmest day in months, & the cats had stopped
fighting for once to peer out the window, & we ate
fried dough with pork on the porch, smoked bud,
& they said they wished it was groundhog day
so we could waltz in the kitchen again, dig our teeth
into whole nectarines again, & relive over & over
this day of finally waking up to taste the world
like we used to, before we lost the will to live in it,
& while we were still here, folded onto each other
like fresh laundry & smelling of pear trees,
I was already grieving the day as if it were gone.
& the first thing A said to me was that I kept them
up all night laughing in my sleep as if I wasn’t
really asleep at all, & the sun was pouring out,
the warmest day in months, & the cats had stopped
fighting for once to peer out the window, & we ate
fried dough with pork on the porch, smoked bud,
& they said they wished it was groundhog day
so we could waltz in the kitchen again, dig our teeth
into whole nectarines again, & relive over & over
this day of finally waking up to taste the world
like we used to, before we lost the will to live in it,
& while we were still here, folded onto each other
like fresh laundry & smelling of pear trees,
I was already grieving the day as if it were gone.