In the summer my spine grew bent from the weight of all the poems
I didn’t write about the poets I slept with using loneliness as an excuse,
when in reality all I wanted was some good publication material.
My mother once told me my heart was a wolf in sheep’s clothing,
but I have given up on that metaphor and settled for
oil and vinegar instead. I’ve never gotten any good pieces
out of the people I’ve slept with and actually loved
because the last lines elude me before their first names do.
Time has eroded the protective layer of fat that cages my inner organs
and has left them a shriveled carcass of sentimentality
that seldom fades unless making love turns to fucking,
but usually only in the worst scenarios, of course.
As a child I always shook the branches of our backyard’s peach trees
so hard their pits pelted my outstretched palms like a hailstorm,
and to this day I have no use for olive branches as peace offerings.
Give me a desire so fierce it makes my head ache,
makes me drink orange juice with pulp as a distraction,
forces me to abstain from sex for a year
and writing love poems for two years,
and that will be my peace offering.
My creative writing professor once graded an essay that claimed
the waist is the most erotic part of the human body,
and it wasn’t until I slept with that first poet that I realized why-
because sex is an act of writing a poem with one body as paper
and the other as pen, and through a slight spelling change,
it would be a shame to waste a beautiful thing like that.