Two Poems
Elizabeth Senja Spackman
Unheimlich (Not at home)
Under your golden hair
beneath the white
you sleep
stone eyed and twitching
Live once and more
Hold me if you must
There’s nothing
here not
for the taking.
After the Sex, Simile or Something Like It
I. The beginning
Exactly like when you peel
back a price sticker and you
take some of the surface
of the book or the poster paper
with the adhesive
leaving that fuzzy rough spot
where you can trail your finger
from the gloss to the underneath
Had never loved
with such ferocity
unkempt and belly-deep
wanting nothing but
to be as tawny as
those flesh colored leotards
from modern dance
circa the sixties
smoothing the genitals, breasts
into sexless dolls
II. The fruit
Its translucent color
so alluring and taste and aroma
so gentle and mellow
after admiring feelings
of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft
and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy!
The cardboard sound
of pomegranate skin
as you scrape the ruby kernels
from their papery fascia,
eat them by the palmful
A man bites into his first papaw
catches her eye and
cannot continue
III. The revelations
She says to her
recently come-out daughter
that until Monica, she had no idea
that cunnilingus was something done
outside of pornographic videos.
A quiet moment that does not explain
the finer distinctions between
fellatio, general oral sex, cigars,
what she has been doing in her own apartment
to the sound of the refrigerator hum
these past four years.
She tells him
she told him
because she did not want him
to taste another’s latex
on her labia.
What to say?
IV. The response
When asked at the museum Q&A
for the scariest thing he’d ever done
Bill T looked the young co-ed
straight on
and said it would have to be
opening myself
the first time I let him
pull apart my cheeks
and fuck me in the ass.
or
you see the ballerina,
and all you can think
is How small her boobs!
V. The beginning
Bare-assed and crying
the first blow job between them,
whether beautiful or pathetic
Ten reasons it’s better:
—Don’t have to listen to you slurp your noodles with the same sibilance as your lattes
—There’s no reason to be nice to your father
—I no longer need stare at the ceiling, thinking of polite yet seductive ways to slow that
licking down
—The way you hold your fingers to your thumb and sniff
—
Once when it was different
there was water spreading like a quilt
sand in shoes, on gums and scalps,
a silver shore of wet and light.
In the rock he holds and will not skip
the childish smear of a trace fossil
(not the remains of animals themselves,
but burrows, trails, evidence of feeding).
Planolites, maybe.
Rolls over,
belly up,
as a puppy might say ‘smell me’