We all know about the pedestal-effect:
a person on a platform
preens and the world adores,

tossing bras and glossolalia.
Everybody knows that us girls
just wanna fuck our fathers.

But it’s the glissade of his voice
through the ear to the stomach’s
pit where the word pine

revolves, derived from pin —
pain: this ceaseless dialogue
of bodies and glossaries.

“Let’s Get It On” plays
on the nation’s station as we strip-
tease on our sugardaddies’ knees.

Any specialist’s rhetoric can persuade us
to undress: you don’t need to be a priest
or a rock star to get into my dungarees.

These words are ravenous
he pulls from the galaxy
of his mouth. They form

storm clouds, then suddenly
as sunlight, his tongue is suede
and there’s a sway in my breathing.

This lust is latent, Freud would say
but it was decided by unanimous vote
that he spoke too much, so they forked

out his tongue; now he’s swilling
whiskey with Jung, wishing
he were still lascivious.

It’s not that I want him
in my bed nude, luminous
in the turquoise light of the aquarium

but the sound of him, resound
of his voice falling into my ear: rain
onto the spathe of a calla lily, glistening me.

Oh this sorry heart is a cliché with its imperative
give me, give me, give me, as blood panics to-
and-fro pronouncing its sentence of x’s and o’s.

Without the word there is no world, Schuster declares.
I’d probably sleep with him too if he were cute,
letting loose logos I didn’t know.

But longing is never as clear as a mirror.
Our face a shape in another’s face: diffracted
a thousand times, and shining

and shining.

Undone

Courting Procrustes

you are the rim of night in the denouement
of a day that started as a stutter of light, then rain

wreckage, bed of wet petals, the unsaid,
insinuation of sleeping men

lover, let me listen in
to the blood meridian

outside, wet grass captured by moonlight
appears as endless fields of shattered glass and apples

now, the only sound the stridulation of spiders,
crush of bones in their purse of skin

the stretch of flesh is like linen pressed into hands
of lachrymose ladies at the opera

where the heroine waits for forty days
and forty nights for her lover to return

unaware as the audience is aware
that her young lad has lost his feet

and will not be returning with a bloom
of gardenias and a ring, containment

is the key to contentment,
measurement is your gift to the haphazard

impulse in each one of us,
all night I dream of dismemberments

but you remain next to me as I wipe tears
or sweat, I no longer know which,

from my darkness that will not halt,
I am drawn to your preparations

actions, Honey, any myth
can move his mouth

Air. Echo. Shadow.