I was twelve, too young to be left alone mornings
after Mama packed her paper hat and sugar-dusted
shoes to push gumballs down the assembly line.
So I was unceremoniously dumped at the door
of old Mrs. Gore’s mouse-addled basement hovel,
where the matron of snapping gum and gray grin
ushered me in and plopped me down in a chair
that stank of a dog they didn’t own. Seeing how I was
bleary and unslept, Mrs. Gore would open the door
to the bedroom where her twin girls, Kathy and Karen,
still dreamed on the edge of alarm. Peppery, flailing,
their waking bodies unwound to carve me room.
I don’t know how it started, how, wordlessly, Karen
and I tussled skin, adjusted knee and cunt, naturally
knew the repeating mouth and its looping stanza.
She smelled like what I couldn’t stop swallowing.
Content to thrive on a flickering cinema of ourselves,
our eyes fluttered, never fully opened. We pretended
a blazing slumber, hushing the grind, the soft rustle
of sparse sweating pubic, even after her unsuspecting
sister stretched and tumbled out to begin her day.
Strange she didn’t suspect our engine. For as long
as we could, Karen and I stayed prone in exquisite,
pressurized tangle beneath the knotty orange chenille.
We kept up the being blind, crashing into dampening
borders, until her fat mother shuffled in to rouse us,
throwing shades open to the damnable day, introducing
the stupid, useless notion of language again. By then,
there was a drum buried in our bellies. We stank like
men, all up under that sweet funk first sin leaves behind.