His teeth are lilies bursting from asphalt—white, many petaled opulences; amid danger, there is also beauty. When he whips me with the riding crop of his tongue, I curl into the earth’s first question: To desire what exactly? He has nothing
I have found you where I shouldn’t—in the wrong bodies, at the wrong time, and once on a subway platform with my feet stuck to a pool of dried soda taking gum from a near-stranger’s mouth. That night you were spearmint and the 6 train. I have been woken by you, put to bed by you.
The first time he appeared to Pablo was on the bus during the nine-thirty tour. It happened during a pause in the narration while they rode from the restaurant that had belonged to Emilia Basil (the dismemberer) to the building where Yiya Murano (the poisoner) had lived.
After thirty years of disaster with men and fresh from a spanking-new heartbreak, I’m back in Miami, back in my dilapidated condo in paradise, to decide if it’s time to retire from love.
Even my mother thinks I should. When I called to tell her of the latest disaster, she sighed and said, Maybe, darling, you should give up on all that. Maybe it’s just time.
Okay, I’ve got other loves, after all. My broken-down mother. My blind old cat. A love poet who’s been dead two thousand years whose words I’m being paid to translate. A friend or two via text.
When he thought about it, he could see that this thing with Alexa Jamison was a betrayal of the idea of what Sonya and he had been: the romance of that. Such a sweet beginning seems always to create a following inertia: the two families, everybody coming together as part of the story.
Kimberly Johnson, Alex Lemon, and Brenda Shaughnessy take up the poetics of God-lust with renewed, edgy, often darkly humorous imagination in distinctive second books of poetry.
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