I have, he says, never seen lips like yours,
and I am serene here fastened by stacks
of CDs refusing the corner, butts squashed
on the wooden table, ash and ash, a half-eaten
half-brown apple he offers me. And the moon,
too soon on its last leg, drunk on the smallness
spring breaks, beetles beside us while we watch
Monica hoop with Quincy in his dorm room on TV,
muted, bumping its head to what we listen to—Girl you look good
why ’ont you back that ass up, you a fine ma’fucka,
why ‘ont you back that ass up. The curt smell of cigarette smoke—
he exhales—soaks the room in a whisper.
The silence splays open, and Monica scores. I ask him
why he moved to this city, take a swig of the whiskey
I brought in a nameless bottle, nearly a memory of itself.
To get away from my ex, he shifts in his skin,
he was crazy as hell. I, after promising myself I wouldn’t,
grab his pack of cigarettes, smack smack smack
against my palm. Here, let me light it for you.
The bluebird in his eyes screams, sweetens the nicotine
pirouetting in my lungs as, from outside—Your neighbor, I ask—
he nods—a man yells, Why am I always the last one on your list?
Whatever is in the air settles. How will I tell him I came
to receive his cruelty? Another swallow of whiskey wings
and I look at him: silken, domestic, shirtless—
Was your ex Black or white? He is calm as he expels,
Black, I only date Black men. I wanted to spoil beneath
that splinter, that long-tongued thorn.
Is it ill of me to have let lust weed my blood? I have,
I know, been better, but we monkey into the shower.
How skillful the steam outlines our friction as he forces
the showerhead up my ass. You’ll be so clean, he says.
I will, trust, be clean enough for him to whittle inside me—
Clean me, oh Lord—like light from a train threading
its way through the city. Back on the couch, river-dry
and arrested under Let me lick you up and down
’til you say stop, his fingers branch my waist.
I become his honeyed hanker, his in-too-deep voice,
You like daddy inside you, his spit and purr and butter,
his snake at the neck of my blackness. My blackness—