Sex (6.09)

I.
There is a match in your stomach;
do not rub it awake.

No matter how soft his palms.

II.
I did not want it…
to have them flush me out
like the bowl of a toilet.
I bent myself over the bathroom sink
putting my fingers around your imagined head,
and I squeezed through the flesh.
Or maybe it was your foot, your whole germ of a self.
I hoped you’d pop open like a cherry tomato,
dribble out in stringy bits, like my monthly red tide
full of chopped fish.
I squeezed and gagged,
my face in the mirror as pale as if the petals
had fallen off a rose.

III.
She held her hands above her head
Making a wide circle of her fingers.
As the wind blew through she whispered
empty, empty, empty..

IV.
There were no trees.
There were no cupping valleys of moss.
The shelves stood, bare and light,
not laboring under the usual weight of so many footprints
left by men in the fields of snow.
They could see nothing,
like stacks of vacant eye sockets.

It looked like freedom from a distance,
No little red tether
Coiled inside one part of a symbiosis.
There were no hinges,
There were no bodies to be hung from the trees,
There were no children’s swings dangling
From the branches – there were no branches –
To give the illusion of flight.