EMPRESS II

I rolled in the leaves spread my knees over a stone felt its

cold kiss through my jeans. Mouth open in the undergrowth,

beetle busy over my lip. I put my arms around the porch

post and kissed it, solemn, risking the frozen splinter, isn’t

this what love is? Straddling the rotting trunk how grateful

I was to be made exactly thus. To cut my thigh on the branch.

To rub my cunt against the moss.

What was taken from you, I want to know. Or did you not

have what I had, so could not lose what I lost.

TRIPTYCH

It’s one of those afternoons, private lessons, this time a

boy who is completely beautiful, his back a Bacon-esque

slab bent over the table, young and dark, and I’m sorting

through his pens when the mail comes, a letter, from you,

an excuse to slice your way into my head again, in case I’d

forgotten, the way you give your t’s sharp tails, I can only

read every other word, and you don’t sign your name, and I

hear the boy’s voice, a question—

—and I look at his easel and he says, I don’t know what to do

here, touching some obscure moment in his drawing, I can’t

even see what he means, and I stare with the letter pressed

against my hip, making a sound like I’m thinking, about his

problem, as if it matters, and at some point I feel his eyes

down my shirt, I haven’t worn a bra, and I keep looking at

the paper. I’m older now, you write to me sometimes, you

don’t call. I hand him an eraser without looking to see what

he thinks of my breasts, and he scrubs away the thing he

doesn’t like, he makes new marks—

—while I sit by the window and cross my legs and refold

the letter and take up a pen and stake out in savage lines

the shape of this stupid talented boy, I don’t care, I could sit

on his cock, I don’t care, and I draw that, too, the crudest

fucking, the nib groaning against the page and he is looking

at me and I meet his eyes with so much fury he has to look

away and I close the book and toss it on a table and cap the

pen and then I just don’t feel anything about any of it and he

finishes his drawing and I tell him to be more assertive and

then he gives me money and he leaves and I have to laugh