It’s said it takes seven years
to grow completely new skin cells.
To think, this year I will grow
into a body you never will have touched.
 - Brent Elizabeth Jenkins

Blue, lemon and red are the colours of May.
I won't be the overbearing perfume on your t shirt.
I won't be the last drink before bed.



"I cannot play with you," the fox said, "I am not tamed."

My arms are just two things in the way
Until I can wrap them around you

I can feel you out there moving
You're mine, I know I'll find you
And my head is my only house until I've found you
- Beefheart

Roses are breasts, lilacs are breasts.

I address the tip, make a white diagonal slice with my finger (tip)

Light it up with the palm of my hand; Present.

Glow. That torso.

'Give me the mut.'

Shake me - suspended in your room. Destination Forever.

We'll meet on that whistling threshold - under - wreath of bowed stamen.

One day he married the idea of me; stabbed me, bellowing, back into the world.

Licentious. Uncultivated. I can be.

'We wonder whether people like us as though we were helpless to sway the verdict: forgetting the impact of attention, warmth, lunch' Alain de Botton

Girl:
(and you thought you were intoxicated, but)
It was darshan in the streetlight-illuminated gutter-heaven
which lead you, blind (you did not even pray to stray them-)
by the fixation of the eyes (of your stumbled-upon deity.)
His face was like a verse in a dead language that spoke to you
when it shouldn't -
(adoration ate you like you a lamb.)
You found him
under that yellow light that was smeared (sickly by his halo-skin)
and then on that thing: faith (that earthly whim)
you followed him up, in his tender care,
he was leading you to heaven- to lie with you there.

He laid you in his manger, and for a while you nestled in the dead silken hay,
(and although you knew he was purest)
you let him make a false idol of you (all primitive) like those made of clay.

so then you climbed up on to the pulpit of his godly groin,
you testified, (preached to the ceiling) and blood wrung out of your loins
and he crucified you there,
you hated yourself- barbed-wire became your hair.
the numinous was nauseating (every sacrifice felt flat)
you wished you'd have chosen: a donkey, an ox or an inn-cat.

Boy:
After the alley way, you realized what your hand held.
You could see it in her lips, her previous romantic martyrs' blood still dampened them- a fleshy dew (never staining though.)
She was a cultic object, boys (like in their sandpit days)
had played archaeologist; they had
peered under her tulle ivy,
(and half-spied for some Eden their daddy muttered when drunk!)

But she was not a lamb without defect for their (or your) sins.
You had laid her on linen as if so, like an offering to your Father (your masculinity.)
But she had beautiful earthy defect:
(she was not hellish like her lips lied,
or her form emanated from an empyrean avalanche like her eyes lied)
she was shakti (and all of her own consort)
(and all else was below her)- a phenomenon which put minds in purgatory.
After the toil, her play-archaeologist boys were babied, all they could do was love her (omnibenevolently.)
And when you saw her on the linen, you realized what your hand had held.

You laid down by your habitual hierophany of the earth.
She clambered on top of you (you- her lowly donkey.)
Her lungs were church organs, her sighs a choral choir.
You sweat the blood of pleasure, you felt her tickles like scourging,
the bed becomes the cross-beams,
and the lead-phallus nails of erotic rapture start to bludgeon
their way through your wrist meat. The thorned bloody pains of all her sisters:
a spiked crown with insect ends which burrow into your skull.
You try to bellow"into thy hands I commit my spirit!" but the insects have eaten your tongue.
But in climax you die;
the beam sprouts branches (a cherry tree) and roots itself in its fabric soil (scraped to the bottom of the bed)
your wrist blood becomes a red sticky tar, then softens in droplets, her lips descend down to you, she cups your blood-cherries (for she prefers them to apples) with her lips, she sucks and devours them.
At last she delivers you from suffering,
she draws you out from your bloody river
she bundles you in the beam-tree bracken, a little basket.
And with that,
your orgasm: the last iconoclasm.

virgin’s weeds

It’s been said that a sugar cube can

pollute a clutch of rabbits, their

hunger waxing until they’ll eat

anything from an ear of corn to a

spike of cactus. I water cattails

with a silver creampot, just a

barefoot nun with an iron

spade and a palmful of blueberries.

Thunder boils the graybowl

sky, storms pitching dustwebs

from the undersides of bay

laurels. There are no petals

in convent gardens, only smothering

vines of peppers, plum baby

tomatoes, crabapples for

jelly. In this place, there are two

possibilities: pluck or bury.

Susan Slaviero



At fourteen a boy touches your hair—twists his fingers in its brown

and pushes it gently behind your ear. Your hair belongs stuck to

the sides of your face: slim, pointed, shiny as ice. But instead it’s

long and looped under your chin and so he touches it—puts it

behind your ear where it gets stuck on the pewter back of

your earring. You ask him to leave. This is not loneliness; it’s

piety—the tainted bit of hair, a sacrifice. Scissors cut it off

quickly in your bedroom upstairs, where the door is closed, where

the windows are painted shut, where the twin bed waits for

you—narrow, sheetless—the quilt bunched and shaped like a

skinned pear.

- Colen O'Conor

From http://honeysucklethighs.tumblr.com/


Hummingbirds,

wrapping their wings around my heart.

I do not know what loves feels like but I

think this warmth is it.

Stay, nest on my pink lungs. My heart

does not beat anymore; it flutters.

Well, I swoon and I lean cause I can't stand erect
She thinks I'm swoonin' just for special effect.
No, I swoon and I linger, so delighted.
When she kisses me I still get so excited
After all this time.

Petra Collins