La Belle et La Bette

“You’re a wolf,” she said.

He remembered that for years—

That first encounter.

Teeth bared;

At attention, ready to pounce.

She swooned.

A live one,

A willing participant,

Special Comrade Number One.

His wild hair,

Whiskers,

Eyes,

And mouth

All dark between her breasts.

Squeezing and sucking.

A cab ride home,

Indian summer.

After martinis

and Irish coffee.

More studies in experimental philosophy.

La Toilette

She lay there

waiting to be loved.

In the bathtub

with a ruby navel

for a marble goddess.

Fingers move through the water

and her thighs.

A warm,

wet

cycle.

Red jewels swim out of her

like evil fish

and fill the tub.

Moving,

wriggling,

never sinking.

Everything is soft and hard, all at once.

Silky like shortening

and sharp as a knife.

Flowers Are For The Living

You said I smelled every rose in Paris.

We used to raid the old lady’s yard

And give bunches of roses to my mama

Whenever we stayed out too late

Or been rowdy

Or if she had a fit on.

I can still smell them in the back of my memory.

Sweet like sugar on my teeth.

So fragrant, but only for a moment.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,”

Whitman wrote after Lincoln was assassinated.

The lilacs didn’t bloom in Virginia this year:

Not in my mother’s yard

Or at Grandma’s, long dead,

Nor up the road at the top of the hill.

All the bushes bitten by frost.

“One for Madame?”

A laurel for five euros;

“It smell good.”

The jasmine garland you bought me

Floated in the hotel room where I left it beside the bed,

Through the billowing curtains and window unshuttered,

Into the night sky

Breaking the string.

And the plucked petals formed clusters of cold white stars.