Crocodile Love
Like flint and steel,
we spark, we flare. We make love like barbarians. Your brute to my brutality.
We thrash. Buckle.
Then melt. Lick each other stupid. Your cock, half-asleep in my mouth,
begging to be licked,
sucked, almost swallowed. How tenderly I hold it between my teeth. As
carefully as the
mother crocodile on the Nature Chanel swallows up her hatchlings, slips them
beyond her mouth and
into her giant pouch. You’d think she was human, how tenderly she
transports from shore
to river, this prehistoric mama, whose bite is the strongest in all Nature.
Look how lovingly I
hold you in my mouth, transport you to bliss.
It’s mating season again,
and the big males
slap the water, vying for attention. We’re used to it, the bravado and display.
The way you nuzzle
me, soft kisses turning ravenous, seeking possession, much as the male croc
nuzzles, then mounts
his mate. She raises her body high in the water, lets him have his way.
First Published in
TRIGGERED, 2023
She Says Stalker/He Says Fan
If you can’t be free, be a mystery.
—Rita Dove, “Canary”
She’s a singed torch song, a broken chord, the slip-shadow between
superstar and the door. She’s that long stretch of longing riding shotgun from
nowhere to L.A., a bottle of Jack Daniels snug between her thighs, always some
fresh loser at the wheel. She’s the Zippo in your darkness, a glimmer of
goddess in your god-forsaken life, her voice a rasp, a whisky-tinged caress.
She gets you, and you know the words to all her songs, follow her from
dive bar to third-rate club clapping too loudly, making sure she makes it home.
She’s as luckless in love as you are, star-crossed, the pair of you (in your
dreams). If only we could choose who we love! Tonight the bartender pours your
obsession one on the house, dims the lights in the half-empty room as she walks
on stage, defenseless, but for that 0018 rosewood Martin she cradles in her lap
like a child. If you ask nicely, she’ll end with the song you request night
after night, about the perils of unrequited love. You’ll blurt out your worship
into her deaf ear, while her fingers strum your forearm and her nails break
your skin. Give the lady whatever she wants, you’ll tell the barkeep.
Like that’s even possible.
Hung
“The heart wants what it wants.” — Woody Allen
I.
“So not funny,” I tell her.
“No joke,” she says, shedding crocodile tears.
“The chihuahua hanged himself with a curtain.”
II.
“Right,” I say.”In a dream!” “No.” She shook her head.
“Pepe made a hole in the fabric and caught his little neck.
The harder he struggled, the tighter the noose.’
III.
Pepe had been bad news from the start:
He needed insulin shots daily, peed on the carpet,
shed all over my black pants.
IV.
To me, she was getting off easy.
I thought of asking her to get a black dog next,
or a shorthaired version.
V.
In my world a dog is a dog.
But not for her.
She would not be assuaged.
VI
When I caught her looking at puppies
for sale, I figured she was over the worst of it,
but I was wrong.
VII.
I didn’t want to ask, but I wondered about the curtains.
I shouldn’t have. The next time she invited me over,
they were gone, replaced by vertical blinds.
VIII.
“Now let that little fucker try to kill himself,” she smiled.
“Just let him try!” She put him on a short leash,
named him Pepe Junior.
Published in Setu, 2022
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