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photo by lady k

THE
DEATH
OF SEX

I.

In the space
of two days
I have had
more sex
than
in the
last three
months.

I can no longer
masturbate
without thinking

about
how sex
changes
everything

about how she
wants me
more than
I want her

about how I
want someone
else
more than I
want her

but still
not more
than she
wants me.

about how
tonight
she will ask
me to call her
tomorrow.

about how
tomorrow
I will want
nothing to do
with her

or anyone
for that matter.

about how
this drives me
away from
people
after having
buried myself
in them

about having
to force myself
to remember-
to not care
for anyone
except
my own need
to get off.

I no longer
want
it when it
is hungry
and easy

when it
is the only
thing that
happens

II.

when I think
about it-
I think of
women-

overly
imperfect

with full
heads
giant bellies
tiny
tongues

I can never
get off
when they go
down

with tears
and
baroque
kabuki orgasm
then
wonderful
sleeping
silence.

with dead
drunk
loss of
consciousness
immediately
afterwards

followed later
that night
and far more
sober
with leaving the
room
once they
see my hairy
belly
and tits.

with long
discussions
about the
soul

followed by
crying

followed by
more fucking

followed by
marijuana,

more fucking,
water,
coffee
and then
pancakes-
only to end

after more
fucking

in a screaming
argument
in the early
morning rain
about who
loves
who

followed by
more fucking.

and with
nothing other
than the
need
to never be
alone.

III.

I dont think
I like it
anymore.

this thing
that happens
afterwards
to me

made up of
slow awkwardness
and a fear
that they
want things
I either dont
have

can't give

or have but
dont want to
give because

or have and
am afraid to
give because

Because I am
afraid to give
myself
to
them

real
imperfect
women.

IV.

I've heard
of this

the death
of want

when once
before
I asked
her
if she
liked sex

and she
said no

but she
gave anyway
and then
thanked
me.

The end
to the
want
for sex
that lives
as long
as my
memory

or how much
I want
to see you
again.

Nick Traenkner

TRAVEL IN PILLOWCASES

I’ve eaten purple recollections – of peach fields
and groped the brambles where fruit collections
travel in pillowcases, blind to passing memories
of larkspur and pussy willow and dandelion
cotton in the gentle, sunny breath.

Overseen cheap dissections of newsprint albums
with their pressed decaying flowers, section
by section, syrupy reminiscences,
water-damaged and sickly sweet instances
of ground-shorn decomposing treefruit 
decomposing in summer’s attic

like invisible, aging beasts tilling the soil
into sweet sweet wine or maybe at least
vinegar, poisoning the air we inhale
with the rotting, honest passage
from wet season to wet season;

(Or the unnatural preservation
of rotten, imposter specimen).

I confess I kissed your lungs
exhaling warm dust into the light and mist
into the bruised humidity the day wore limply
like a damp, silk camisole
between vinyl car seats and a spine.

I polished heart-shaped trinkets
and swallowed the dust from your lips;
your bitter, wine-blossomed, powder lips
and licked the moisture from your memoir
pages, so the ink all bled together.

Sticky thighs in rich corduroy. And
confectioners sugar on your breasts;
your tiny broken ribs in the bluegrass
as you dream of talking animals
and your hair brushed by the wind –
brushed by the salty, winter gasp of wind on ice;

but like molasses, like the deepest blue underwater light.
And you dream of talking animals who need not till the earth.

Undressing History; spying through the translucent gauze
of action and reaction that orders our bodies
can we alter the course from stone to pebble, from
puddle to sea – by digging? By dissecting? Will we
ever find gold in them hills or get her out of her underwear?

An archeologist is not the same thing as a robber baron
and neither are pathologists ruddy wind-worn sea captains.

These boots trollop elsewhereupon, for a dewy future
beyond darling dirt and sugar-sodden earth, beyond
sandy woodblock prints of pink foam horizons and
appleseeds’ venom and frigid blooms that press us on
and on, like fireworks sparkling into tomorrow.

In the perpetual arclight of the unseen ether, in
the relaxed dawn of our dead Atlantis parallax,
the saltwater we breathe in this peopled ocean seems
light as air.
But we tire –

Until we become scalpel-wielding students in a musty science class,
Or really, drowsy prospectors
scanning for pyrite in the clay and azure past,
once again

like teenagers
fumbling to unhook a bra.

Charles Spano 

BEAT

Can’t you feel the blood
flowing the rhythm of
wing beats the sigh of dew
dipped blossoms at dawn,

while the world swirls round
and round sailing through sprinkled
diamonds as dust explodes into
a view that was then and is now
still speeding forward.

Don’t you want to say here I
am, aren’t we lucky to sweat
together,

man, the neutrino winds
blownin’ my hair back took
thousands of light years to get
here coolin’ my heated skin from
the echos of when the pulse was
electro-shocked into life,

and we stand here feeling the
reverberations in our toes
up our spine settling in our
hip bones sharing pollen

so more can
sail on this wave
before it crashes onto shore.

Steve Thomas

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