STEVE NASH
Critical Reading
When you breathe ‘Lead me into the woods’
I trace a breadcrumb trail down the flood
of your back, dropping two coin kisses
in the shallow hollows at the base.
When you purr ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’
I unravel a woodsman scar, rolling
a claw from clavicle to navel,
following the fault line with pointed tongue.
When you beg ‘Show me the lands in the sky’
I spread beanstalk tendrils from the curve
of your calves, grazing ever upwards
to the gentle hum of fee – fi – fo – fum.
When you call out ‘Mirror, show me the future’
I press a promise from my lips to yours:
no matter the vision your emerald eyes see,
the reflection in mine is all that you need.
But when you scream ‘Shuck me like an oyster!’
I wish you came with appendices.
LYNN HOFFMAN
Rhyming Rita and Silver Sam
Rhyming Rita’s watching Silver Sam –
she likes to watch the old man’s muscles,
vines, she says, smaller harvest, sweeter fruit.
She’s couched just so, a pillow here
a cushion there. He walks slowly, naked,
smiling as if time were no thing at all.
(Sammy knows about time, seen his share,
likes it every way but empty.)
He kneels and draws the lines of Venus lightly
with his fingers, skating figures on her warm skin.
She gathers him in, he fits just so you know.
He kisses lips and neck and breasts and belly,
he’s an avalanche, our Silver Sam,
down Rhyming Rita mountain.
At the base, at the very thinness of
her thicket, he brushes the brush and whispers
away and talks in tongues, his story starting
slow, tilted, sideways, soft, barely there –
then only there where there there
‘No, go, slow, slow, oh, go, go’
says Rhyming Rita as Sam delays and plays
in all the ways he knows.
It’s later, she’s lost count, he never started.
Rhyming Rita starts to cry,
‘Oh my oh why,
I hate this fate, so late, so late,
so wrong it took so long
to find you’ and Sammy says
‘It’s not so late,
and slow beats fast,
we only saved the best for last.’
JULIA BIRD
Press Play
I
Load too much credit in the jukebox
and every single ever written
starts to play at once.
Vocals and bass lines,
choruses and middle eights,
session brass, children’s choirs, sitars
swept up in a high tide of soundwaves
lining up and clicking home
and wiping themselves out.
The composite hit
is a white wall of sound.
Decibels unreadable as silence.
II
Replay and overlay us the last time
with every time that’s gone before.
You, me, and. You, me, or.
Touch is papered over touch
like a ricked joint rubbed numb,
or gooseflesh on sunburn.
Like a stack of transparencies
held to the light, such
chaotic couplings –
a pinned or stretching limb
in every second of a circle, some
bomb blast or star burst. Some chrysanthemum.
III
With the white noise on repeat,
attune yourself till every cell
buzzes like a snare drum
and pick them out:
that run of double claps,
Minnie’s head-notes, shattering.
A low sliding scale of Tom,
and the song that holds its nerve
on the fadeout rainstorm.
NICOLA WARWICK
The Horse of My Love
I led the horse of my love to the wood
and tethered it there. And when the autumn came,
its reins fell like dead leaves shivering downwards.
Its coat took on the colours of the trees.
I slipped the bit from the gentle of its mouth
and loved it all the more.
As the season changed, I found a forest pool,
knelt and lapped the chill of water,
refreshed my mind with ice-melt.
I cupped a little in my hand, carried it
through the crackled grass to my home
and washed my face.
Icewater pulsed in my veins.
I knew, then, I needed to be warmed
to make me human.
This desire forced me out into a night
of misted breath and solitude.
My stomach growled in emptiness.
It pushed me to where my little love was stabled,
quiet as a winter’s eve. I fed the horse of my love
on red apples till my hands were sore with juice.
ALI LEWIS
photographs from our holiday in bed
this is
the night we slept how you draw an x in maths
the night we lay facedown smug as pocket aces
the night we peeled apart like pitta from itself
the night I was ampersand and you were treble clef
the night we were paper figures strung across the bed
the night our bodies framed a question asked in Spanish
the night you coiled yourself into a burning ear
the night you unravelled like a Danish or a fern
the night we were the ‘t’s in ‘better’
the night that I was seat and seatbelt
the night that you were cloak and brooch
the night that I was scarf and snowshoes
the night we slept like harboured boats
the night we were coil and core of a magnet
the night we were strawberry and lime in a Twister
the night our hips were a painting of hills
the night we slept like the logo of Kappa
the night we were stacked like strata in clay
the night the bed wore its sheet off the shoulder
the night you led from your hand to mine
the nights we fashioned from day
JAMES HORROCKS
I Went to a Parthenogenesis Party and Met an Aphid
I jerk you off
a rose, with my hand
moving as if to unsheathe
a sword.
Your body is
a chamber of nymphs,
my Russian Dolly.
Sap sucked,
six of you
dropped onto me.
We lay there
in stillness,
we were
clones of each other.
A ladybird
arose, shedding
spotted clothes off
her shoulders.
I see her split
down the middle
like her name.
You turned green
as she came
for her prey.
You left me.
None of you
can know
how to be alone.
ALI THURM
Bluebells
are glowing under the birch trees.
The sign says Do not pick the flowers.
But I want their cold flesh
in my hands – to pick
and pick, until juice runs down
the inner sides of my wrists.
His long back, long feet
are covered in gold
hair.
It’s the wolf of course.
What he wants from me is unspeakable
they said.
Bluebell sap has soaked my skirt.
His paws are soft. His mouth is hot –
his breath steams,
smells of bilberries, brambles.
They lied about the meat.
I’ll show you the way he says.
I don’t want to hurt you.
The cottage door is open –
a smell of earth, fallen leaves.
I take off my coat and go upstairs.
NISHA BHAKOO
Mad flash
Your face is on fire
as you take in my raven
moist and cake
naughty behind curtains
gold curtains have eased
the heart that pumps for itself
alone, loose and paw-pink
flushing the organ of cartoon
beats and bruises I received from
the tentacles of neighbours
(they never put glass in their eyes)
feeling me up, fastening
to my venison thighs
stripping me like a pin-up
whipping the dream of pill-white skin
burning my breasts with Velcro palms
arousing me with the sharps of
their nails
chicken scratch surface
chicken scratch strips
walk away, your dog is barking
pull up your socks
I know all about your eyes
can’t you see I’m ready to liquefy?
your face is on fire your face is on fire.
STEPHEN SEXTON
Second Circle
We were alone, and we suspected nothing.
Dante Alighieri (trans. Mandelbaum)
You’ve been going through each book and CD.
I’ve found the long black threads of your hair
in Crash, which you aren’t ashamed to read aloud.
So with the wind as it is, yes, there
is a case for staying the night; branches
twist and slap at the picture window – where
I’ll draw the blind – submitting evidence.
The streetlights have remade
the pressing oak trees into silhouettes.
All this in the wind makes a house of my bed.
The wind insists. The wind
is your breath shallowing on the back of my head.
I wake in the night with you behind
me and the wind slight at the window sill.
One twig
scratching an inch of glass reminds me
you are not asleep
your hands are far from still.
RICHARD O’BRIEN
Magician’s Assistant
Legs. Released by the entrance song
they spread like an accordion,
collapse. I have been working on
resistance to your charms –
and failing that, my upper arms.
Dry ice evades all smoke alarms.
*
After the show I hold your cloak
above the dust of the retail park.
Step lightly, darling, through the dark.
Your sequined foot unsticks the clutch;
unchoreographed, our belts click shut.
An escapologist is never stuck.
One room. You clatter through the minibar;
your wrists, their first-time fire-thrower scars.
My heart’s a sleeve that won’t stop spilling scarves.
*
I’m breathless at your sleight of hand;
be good to me, the Great, the Grand.
The cushions levitate. I never see them land.
We climb inside your velvet trunk,
dodge hidden drawers, gewgaws and junk,
half-dressed and more than halfway drunk,
and bring the lid down, plush with galaxies
that stroke your spine, lending their light to me.
I’m finding glitter in your hair for weeks.
*
Another town. You spin the box
then come toward me, blade aloft,
brushing my fingers when you turn the locks.
I curl my knees up, count to ten
and let you split me, put me back again.
Exhale. I was a different person then.
AMY McCAULEY
Auto-Pornographia
You and I, little lovebud,
have not always been well-acquainted.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Come then, little extraneous,
from your stable of folds.
Sing your song of terminal neglect,
terminal longing.
You had such hopes, bud.
Come to my right hand,
little useless. Swell
under the thumb and spread
your tiny fleshwings.
O illicit finger buffet.
O snaffled peripheral bloom.
Pour draught upon draught
of glitter across my skin.
I will give in, wee harlot,
to the slutty Mexican wave. I will bite
down on the dried up gag.
O underused one.
O surplus to the body’s economy –
Come, I will sing you this song
that I make with my right hand.
GEORGE DAVID CLARK
Cigarettes
It’s August, hot, and a newly-married
couple in Mobile have left the window
partly open to the night and road noise
while they make love on a futon in the dark.
After, as he breathes heavy on the pillow
beside her and a thin clear string of semen
seems to quiver on the white guitar
that is her belly, she sighs and says,
Oh, now I wish I had a cigarette.
He’s been thinking he should pull the sheet
from where it’s bunched along the floor
and it takes him a moment to understand
that cigarettes – which both of them detest
and she has never tried – are not her point.
She phrases it that way because pleasure
is complicated, more so perhaps than suffering.
It will augment and diminish, both,
not unlike the ancient priests who’d purge
the humid entrails of the pharaohs
and then bathe the bodies’ cavities
with myrrh and frankincense and palm wine,
freights of fragrance in the hollows after.
She means that monuments to rapture
should be light to carry and combustible,
toxic in small quantities even secondhand,
and with an odour that darkens one’s clothes.
Somehow he comprehends this vaguely.
It reminds him of a concert he attended
in high school, the massive outdoor stage
where the band played one encore, a second,
then mangled their guitars across the amps
and footlights: sparks, debris, electric howling.
Stoned and riding home with his ears fuzzing
in the back of a friend’s Topaz, he felt
invincible and fantasized a car crash.
He’d passed out then, and later, coming to
sore-throated and coughing on his parents’ porch
where the guys had left him, it was as though
some breakneck song – all glass and metal
in his mind – had wrecked around him.
He rose there slowly and limped out of it
the way a man emerges from a shattered
windshield, the live adrenaline already
funneling off, but with a few stray echoes
still looping through his chest like feedback.
Tonight on the far side of the room
long gray minutes. Eyes shut, motionless,
his wife leans toward sleep. Her teeth
are tingling faintly, white but crooked
on the bottom row. She has clenched
and ground them during sex again
and now she guesses at the likelihood
of braces in her future when there’s money.
It is her habit to sweep the tender downside
of her tongue across the misalignments
where the frets of wire might someday run,
and for a moment her mouth becomes
the smoky back room in a downtown bar
where a struggling band from out-of-state
is just about to plug in their Les Pauls.
Nascent music crackles in the outlets,
jittering, almost perceptibly, the ashtrays.
A breeze sleepwalks the curtains back
into the room and out again. Back and out.
Her husband slides his heel along her calf
and starts to tell her they should set his legs
on fire (she could inhale while they kiss),
but no, she’s gone unconscious. Instead,
he pulls the sheet to their shoulders
and thinks, as he dissolves beside her, how
from a distance they would look like two
thin cylinders wrapped in white, their minds
these grainy filters in their heads. Asleep
before he gets to who might smoke them
and why, his breathing slows and deepens.
The room cools slightly. The traffic
lulls outside and the sex aroma dissipates
till only the air that cycles through their chests
is warmed and sonorous and redolent.
FIONA MOORE
Layers
It’s hot in here after the snow.
I don’t feel it
until we’ve hung our jackets
on chair backs,
unloaded lunch from trays
and sat down. Then I
pull my thick jersey off,
up over my head.
As I push back some
flying hair
I half-see, half-sense
Mildly Erotic Verse Page 4