Two Poems

The Wall

She swooned against the sticky wall at the gym. Her palms sweat against paint so thick she could feel the goosebumps of it. The backs of her knees were cold; her tendons quivered like strings. His hands spread like a butterfly across her shoulder blades.

Like a butterfly across a blade of grass, she shivered. “Keep your shoulders flat against your back as you bring your hands down,” he told her. She slid her palms down the wall.

“Slower,” he said, framing her back with his fingers, coaxing the movement. 

“Let’s move over here,” he said, steering her to a mirrored wall. She stood again, feet hip- width apart, shoulders back. Then she put her palms on the mirror and looked into her own eyes. They were startlingly close, like the scar on her forehead and her cheekbones and the damp perimeter of her hairline. Her pupils were round, heavy and black like weights, covered over slightly by a wispy nimbus. He pressed into her, holding her shoulder blades to her back. She looked straight ahead and eased her hands down the wall. They left trails. She read her own eyes like tea leaves. Neither of them blinked during the slow journey of hands.

His hands pushed into her skin. They moved slowly, twining with her ribs, cupping her heart as though it were a bright and shining precious thing. She swallowed his eyes inside of hers and seized them. His hands bloomed inside her and she dissolved into the image; him behind her, laying claim to her torso, conquering it like a promising piece of land. Her self annexed as a field of wheat in autumn.

Coming Down With It

Before I got sick, my heart

            rested in my chest, leaped

like a neon frog for no one. I found my illness

            at three in the morning in a stuffy warehouse

robot dancing in a coat and tie

            between layers of sound and time

  

forehead moist and silken,

            feet sliding into liquefaction.

It’s also true that I took a tablet of ecstasy

            and fell in love with a spider monkey

tucked inside a crazy man’s coat. At six

            the cops burst in, lined us up and made us exit

by the freight elevator. Crammed 

            next to my dancing man, my forehead

pulsated and sweat snaked down my ribs.

            My elbow lodged against his hip like a holster.

My insides loomed up like Vesuvius

            and I felt at home in my sickness,

undeserving of relief or medicine

            as he spread like gangrene beneath my skin.