Serenade

Songs on our lips touching lips;

your fingers play my thighs like a violin,

the measures of your heart against mine,

the cadences of our caresses punctuated by moonlight,

and my brown warmth against the marble of your skin,

more beautiful than a Greek statue,

colder than the winter winds that stoke our love

like the embers of a fading fire.

Her bra slipped off, revealing her breasts that were waiting for his touch. Her dress, a shift of white cotton, had dropped to her hips, and bunched up around her thighs. She was holding a white lilly, drooping gently in her hand, its petals beginning to slake off like dried skin, which she had plenty of around her lips, the color strawberries.

He despised himself at that moment, for wanting her, for being afraid. She turned her back to him, revealing a marble plynth topped with a mop of green that reminded him of leaves, and for a second she resembled a palm tree. "I am not afraid anymore", she had whispered, and he had been happy.

Now it was he who was afraid, in a night of lengthening shadows and satin sheets, and a woman who winds around his legs like a river, it is he who is moored to his own shore like an abandoned skiff wallowing in the moonlight, water rippling, rippling, away from wood that slips, sliver by sliver, into the water, thousands of shards floating farther and farther from shore.

I am re-reading Dorian Gray, haunted by silk brocades and yellow silence. In the shadows of fading neon lights above the old Mcdonalds, I grow afraid, as if the intensity of myself were too much to bear, and pens become knives that will carve into my skin like tattoos, or hollow me out into those wooden figures that dot mantelpeices like flies. In a vaacum that is neither poetry nor fiction, truth nor prose, I fold into myself like freshly laundered linen, peonies plucked from grass, the bright red of tulips reflecting a sun that burnishes itself onto your golden hair.

I cough and the blood seeps out of my vagina, red on white, the lost caresses trickling out between my thighs, lost laughs sticking to my legs like crimson. I once held the night in my palm like a glass figurine, ready to shatter. Now I cradle the shards between my fingers, seeking to reforge the pieces into a king's sword. Who can tell what the shape will be? Only the night's keen silence is awake to my longing.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Unjustly Jails Amphoras

I am a broken jug, an amphora with no handles,
filled with the vinegar of broken promises and shattered desires
that seep out of my clay, fading glaze of naked greek thighs splashed in rotted wine. •
•
Once I drank the wine of your lips, softer than freshly-pressed olives;
I stored your cinnamon caresses in my crevices.

Now I shed vinegar tears, entombed in a mausoleom of glass,
gawked at by girls who have forgotten Zeus's name. •
I have long forgotten your name, but still taste the sweetness of your honey
pouring into me like Apollo's rays. •

Amorous amphoras sing Aphordite's praises beneath golden linden trees. •

Yet I am deprived even the trees of Central Park - they gave them to the Egyptian
temple,
with its filthy copper coins tossed by those gawking girls,
who have forgotten Horus too, I suppose. • •

I would trade all the linden trees for one more taste of your sweet honey.

"I have finally learned to dog men's shadows" she said, taking a drag on her cigarrette. Her eyes were drawn like curtains, her grey jeans too tight as she stuck up her legs on the dresser. "I have never made you dog my shadows", I said. "That's because you have none. You are just a pure ray of light", she said, her sarcasm searing into me like a knife. I took her palms. "Don't" she said, pulling away, but I could see the cuts from last night. "I'll get you some neosporin", I said. She laughed. "Are you afraid of scarring your painting?" "This isn't Dorian Gray, Dana. This is real life, and blood -oh fuck it!" I could hear her puffing on the cigarette while I searched for neosporin in the bathroom. "Sometimes life immitates art", she said, when I handed her the package.

I was silent as she smeared the thick translucent paste over her skin. I was embarassed by how fascinated I was by the curve of her elbow bending and unbending as she moved the q-tip across her wrist - the ritual sprinkling before the sacrifice. "Have you ever thought of going to a mikvah?" I asked. "Aren't you going to fuck me now?" she asked, her hands reaching for her sweater. "I'm serious; people say its refreshing." Her sweater was already off; her bra was white lace, her nipples peeked out underneath. "Since when have you cared about any of that?" I shrugged. She kissed me. "Let's not turn our relationship into something it's not", she said, leading me to the bed. "Where did you get that line, the Lifetime movie special?" "Fuck you." "Oh, I'll fuck you. I'll fuck you good." One hand reached for the zipper on her jeans; the other went towards her breasts.

Afterwards, as we lay in bed, I stroked the scars on her stomach. "It's even better than tattoos", she said. I laughed. "Much sexier", I said, planting a kiss on a particularly gross-looking one next to her belly-button. "I think I don't love you anymore", she said. There was a moment of silence. "Did you ever?" I asked. "I think so, at one point." Silence. "I think so", she murmured once more. My head was still on her stomach; she began to stroke my hair - stroking the lamb into silence upon the alter with one hand, she had already thrown the knife.

I fell asleep waiting for the fire, knowing the burning would come when I woke up to an empty bed in the morning.