“If you call fucking making love, I’ll kill you in your sleep.”  
– Diane Seuss 
 
 
A still life of my arm languishing 
off the boxspring, the wand limp 
and sliding from my palm, 
the strap buzzing its modern 
concerto—subito piano. 
 
Your moaning quiets 
my womb and I wish for Medusa 
in the mirror—let me stay— 
marble cooling you from the inside. 
I remember when we started this: 
 
a cheap sconce ripped from the wall, 
its head hanging like a war trophy. 
I bled on your duvet and every time 
we tried to wash it, the blood migrated 
a wildfire along the seam. 
 
Dark paint from the wainscoting 
rimes my fingernails, tastes salty 
through the brackish estuary 
of my fingertips. You have an idea. 
I have an idea. We play a game 
 
against the subway tiles. We form a treaty 
called The Next 20 Times You Come 
Onto Me I’ll Drop What I’m Doing. 
You vinyasa between hotel beds 
as we discover subsequent months 
 
where we must focus only on the pleasure 
of holding, rubbing our arms 
across the other’s sternum, draining 
each other’s nighttime lingering 
of bad highs and dishwater. One autumn 
you feed me so many carrots 
I worry I’ll sunset bleed, the carotene 
in my dermis glowing like nuclear fallout.  
Sometimes when you drink, you let me 
feed you too, but never more than once. 
 
Inconvenient to give me an inch this close 
to your tongue, a lapwing that remains 
unchanged after years of spring blizzards—  
if I put my thumb on it, it’s a watercolor— 
a nor’easter bending the trees.