Period

The white wind wraps flat fingers
around your crooked dress. You slice
your lips open like bitten fruit.

There is a poem that swells inside of me.
I slip my words through you, drenched
language that swims between your teeth.

You speak me, pushing your tongue into my
trepid imagery, my swollen sunrise, my orbiting
satellite, my constant turning earth.

I see my hands slide out of your
eyes. I am through you with my touch,
my poem, my body of letters and spaces

and my thin black strands of warm ink.
I want to enter your grainy picture with
my odd sense of sex and distance.

But I fill my sheets with too much sweat and
knees bent up in a curled ball of frustration
and dreamy lyrics and your skin.

The sun spreads a clay slip across your bare
arms; I craft your hidden breasts
into poetry. If I could tell the truth perhaps

you would be naked and your hands would
hold me naked like a pen. If my legs
could rest on top of you like this stanza

spreads across the next, I would want to
turn my lines into you, reaching a long
finish: a conclusion. Yet with every finger

stroke, I press another letter between your
warm legs, and I punctuate each thought
with a long pause and a small lonely dot.