Whole years have passed with me in a state of graceless longing, a desire to be sanctified: the kind of woman who can order a crumb-topped buttered muffin, bursting with hot blueberries, sit & pick at it, barely chewing, barely tasting that deconstructed cake. Taking it slow. I know, this me nods to the man across the café table: this feat of eating bites like sand delivered to my crumb-less, glossy, berry lips with my tapered hand is proof that I am able to restrain, to pluck it to a slow death by degrees: the Marquis killing the Marquise with his crimes. Come on. Every time you’re in the room, I want to unhide the hard line of your cock from the inside of your Springsteen jeans & have it all: good peasant stock. A buxom country lass. Fine, then, I’m a whore, I want it in the ass, I’m every girl, I’m primly closed or full, I’m a gap, a stoppered hole, if I’m not this, I must be that, bat my lashes, flick those morsels from my lips—
but tip your head to mine, & kiss me, & my mouth becomes my mouth, in love with your flesh, wanting to sing & wanting to be quiet, now, but humming a moan of praise when it takes you in, a small thing, really, like this poem, this crumb of a poem, this imaginary slip of a girl at a table with a boy she thinks she’ll get by keeping him at bay, (her shiny straight curtain of hair, those manicured nails picking apart that fucking wasted pastry) that has given in, swallowed you whole.
