around you. If only I could run
a brazen hand along this wood
and feel your heart accelerate
beneath it, rising to your lips.
If only you could pick the whitest
petals from the holy orchard
where I patrol the crevices
and slink along my damned gut,
you could arrange them as you wished
and change the ending of our story.
But we’re disarmed, and nothing changes
in our natural gardens—we cannot grasp
the word hope, which the ones we’ve tempted
find always at their fingertips.
(1994)
MARC COHEN (BORN 1951)
It Never Happened
She licked an invisible command from his palm—
He looked forward to the old days to come.
She let the hot wax trickle down his chest—
He recalled the harshness of certain ruins.
She smiled and asked: “Do you like my breasts?”—
He realized courage doesn’t last very long.
—There was a bright glade of rose and fern.
—The moon was rising; iron shadows fell.
She said: “This isn’t appropriate,” then cooed like a bird—
It was the sweetest, most seductive sound he ever heard.
Afterward, she said: “It never happened, so don’t write about it.”
He sang a silent hymn to the blank pages floating down the river.
She said: “I am the enemy of your destiny.”—
He said: “I am the heat-sink memory that absorbs your frenzy.”
Thunder and lightning struck again.
Soon after, the mattress caught fire,
And was thrown out the window onto Washington Street.
In her mind, snakes replaced the birds that had supplanted the fish.
He read her mind; his hair was singed; he said: “Fuck evolution.”
She moaned: “Oh yes—oh my God, please fuck evolution.”
(2007)
JUDITH HALL (BORN 1951)
In an Empty Garden
Better to fall, better to fall than wait
To be held in air; wanting to be held,
Held in words we use when we embrace.
I wanted to be held in air or fall,
To be held in air. Wanting to be held,
I fell along the air’s slow drawl,
Wanting to be held in air or fall,
As the turning, of a body turned a voice away.
I fell along the air’s slow drawl,
Away from words abundance, blame,
As he turned his body, turned his voice away,
As if I shed the words and gave them shape.
The word abundance, the word blame:
I handed him a place to put his tongue
And shed the words and gave them shape:
A snake, turning his skin into a skeleton.
I handed him a place to put his tongue,
A place where we knew why we kissed.
Like a snake, turning his skin into a skeleton,
I turned the air to kisses, golden nipples,
Any place. I knew why we kissed.
Another apple, another, another tongue.
The air will turn to kisses, golden nipples.
He wanted me to say I did it: Touched
Another apple, another, another tongue.
I will not tell you what we whispered.
He wanted me to say I did it, touched
A history of wishes to be held.
I will not tell you what we whispered.
I wanted him to help me question
A history of wishes: to be held,
Waiting, again, for that first kiss.
Help me. Help me question
The words we use when we embrace,
Waiting again for that first kiss—
Better to fall, better to fall than wait.
(1992)
CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON (BORN 1951)
From Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution (The True Adventures of Suzy Creamcheese)
So, I slept with my lovers, I slept with my friends,
my lovers’ friends and my friends’ lovers,
friends of friends and so on. I slept with my dealer
and my dealer’s dealer, just to be sure.
I slept with some men I barely knew
to prove I was open-minded, or to avoid an argument,
and I slept with some men I didn’t like
just to be nice, or, well, to avoid an argument.
You might say I had an open-door policy.
I took it three ways, I took it sideways:
“thousands of men and a few hundred women.”
Hum jobs, tie me up, half-and-half, and fuck the dog.
I took it in the ass, in my mouth, between my thighs
and way up inside from any angle. Yet what I loved most
was hard dancing to loud music: that beat through the floor,
and bodies swaying, sweating, the tension building,
and getting just to the edge of it, in a room, in a woods,
down a hallway wedged inside a bathroom stall, falling
down fast, or leaning back brace yourself
on the wall, diving into it like stepping on a mine—just
blowing yourself up, all the while holding on
to some sweating panting guy also blowing himself up—
just kick out the door hard mindless sex—I wanted it
as much as the next guy, the next high priestess of come,
and it was ours and all new and fine, and would never end,
until one day love comes roiling up like swamp gas
fermented for years in the collective unconscious
of old songs and bad movies, a distant memory wakening.
His thumbs in his belt loops, his crooked smile
and dark moods, and you think this one is a god
or an avatar of destiny, and you’re nothing unless
he loves you too, and now everything is changed
and you let your life go, like a bad gene or a slow virus.
You’ve bought the gypsy’s curse, the heroine’s undoing,
that fatal weakness inscribed in a hundred novels
you read as a girl in your sweet gabled bedroom
while you were waiting for your life to happen.
(2005)
PAUL MULDOON (BORN 1951)
The Little Black Book
It was Aisling who first soft-talked my penis tip between
her legs
while teasing open that Velcro strip between her legs.
Cliona then. A skinny country girl.
The small stream, in which I would skinny-dip, between
her legs.
Born and bred in Londinium, the standoffish Etain,
who kept a stiff upper lip between her legs.
Grainne. Grain goddess. The last, triangular shock of corn,
through which a sickle might rip, between her legs.
Again and again that winter I made a beeline for Ita,
for the sugar-water sip between her legs.
The spring brought not only Liadan but her memory of
Cuirithir,
his ghostly one-upmanship between her legs.
(Ita is not to be confused with her steely half sister,
Niamh,
she of the ferruginous drip between her legs.)
It was Niamh, as luck would have it, who introduced me
to Orla.
The lost weekend of a day trip between her legs.
It was Orla, as luck would have it, who introduced me to
Roisin.
The bramble patch. The rosehip between her legs.
What ever became of Sile?
Sile, who led me to horse-worship between her legs.
As for Janet from the Shankill, who sometimes went by
“Sinead,”
I practiced my double back flip between her legs.
I had a one-on-one tutorial with Siobhan.
I read The Singapore Grip between her legs.
And what ever became of Sorcha, Sorcha, Sorcha?
Her weakness for the whip between her legs.
Or the big-boned, broad-shouldered Treasa?
She asked me to give her a buzz clip between her legs.
Or the little black sheep, Una, who kept her own little
black book?
I fluttered, like an erratum slip, between her legs.
(1998)
BOB FLANAGAN (1952–1996)
From Slave Sonnets
I’ve been a shit and I hate fucking you now
because I love fucking you too much;
what good’s the head of my cock inside you
when my other head, the one with the brains,
keeps thinking how fucked up everything is,
how fucked I am to be fucking you and thinking
these things which take me away from you
when all I want is to be close to you
but fuck you for letting me fuck you now
when all that connects us is this fucking cock
which is as lost inside you as I am, here,
in the dark, fucking you and thinking—fuck,
the wallpaper behind you had a name,
what was it? You called it what? Herringbone?
(1986)
DORIANNE LAUX (BORN 1952)
The Shipfitter’s Wife
I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat
and smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I would go to him where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles,
his calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I’d open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me—the ship’s
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the first man clanging
off the hull’s silver ribs, spark of lead
kissing metal, the clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle
and the long drive home.
(1998)
PETER SERCHUK (BORN 1952)
The Naked Women
Just when I thought the world
was racing to its end I see them
everywhere; ordering lattes at
Starbucks, bent over crocuses
and daffodils, waiting for buses
and taxis in earrings and heels while
morning finger-paints their backs.
On the streets joggers illuminate
the mundane. At the bank, the same
long line now seems like courtesy
thanks to the teller in Window 2.
And I marvel at the hand of justice
when a policewoman tickets
my car wearing only a pen.
What a wild world we live in,
puppets of money and fear,
as if this brief stop in Eden was
little more than a business trip.
While neighbors hoard tax cuts
and prepare for the apocalypse,
I’m comforted by the evening news;
tan lines cupping the implants of
the anchorwoman who referees
Muslims and Jews, zealots chasing
the innocent with prayer books
and guns while the meteorologist
brings a warming front to my
free and private continent.
(2006)
DENNIS COOPER (BORN 1953)
After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade
Their jeans sparkled, cut off
way above the knee, and my
friends and I would watch them
from my porch, books of poems
lost in our laps, eyes wide as
tropical fish behind our glasses.
Their football flashed from hand
to hand, tennis shoes gripped
the asphalt, sweat’s spotlight on
their strong backs. We would
dream of hugging them, and crouch
later in weird rooms, and come.
Once their ball fell our way
so two of them came over, hands
on their hips, asking us to
throw it to them, which Arthur did,
badly, and they chased it back.
One turned to yell, “Thanks”
and we dreamed of his long
teeth in our necks. We
wanted them to wander over,
place deep wet underarms to
our lips, and then their white
asses, then those loud mouths.
One day one guy was very tired,
didn’t move fast enough,
so a car hit him and he sprawled
fifty feet away, sexy, but he was
dead, blood like lipstick, then
those great boys stood together
on the sidewalk and we joined them,
mixing in like one big friendship
to the cops, who asked if we were,
and those boys were too sad to counter.
We’d known his name, Tim, and how
he’d turned to thank us nicely
but now he was under a sheet
anonymous as God, the big boys crying,
spitting words, and we stunned
like intellectuals get, our high
voices soft as the tinkling of a
(1995)
MARK DOTY (BORN 1953)
Lilacs in NYC
Monday evening, E. 22nd
in front of Jimmy and Vincent’s,
a leafing maple, and it’s as if
Manhattan existed in order
to point to these
leaves, the urbane marvel
of them. Tuesday AM
at the Korean market,
cut, bundled lilacs, in clear
or silvered cellophane—
mist & inebriation,
cyclonic flames in tubs
of galvanized aluminum,
all along Third Avenue,
as if from the hardy rootstocks
of these shops sprouted
every leaf-shine and shade
of panicle: smoke, plum, lavender
like the sky over the Hudson,
some spring evenings, held
in that intoxicating window
the horizontal avenues provide.
Numbered avenues,
dumb beautiful ministers…. Later,
a whole row of white crabapples
shivering in the wind
of a passing train; later,
a magnolia flaring
in a scatter
of its own fallen petals,
towering out of a field
of itself. Is that what
we do? I’ve felt like that,
straddling my lover,
as if I rose
out of something
which resembled me,
joined at the trunk
as if I come flaming
up out of what I am,
the live foam muscling
beneath me….
Strong bole thrust up
into the billow,
into the frills and the insistences
and elaborations,
the self flying open!
They’re flowers, they know
to fall if they bloom;
blessed relief of it,
not just myself this little while.
You enter me and we
are strangers
to ourselves but not
to each other, I enter you
(strange verb but what else
to call it—to penetrate
to fuck to be inside of
none of the accounts of the body
were ever really useful were they
tell the truth none of them),
I enter you (strange verb,
as if we were each an enclosure
a shelter, imagine actually
considering yourself a temple )
and violet the crush of shadows
that warm wrist that deep-hollowed
collar socket those salt-lustered
lilacy shoulderblades,
in all odd shadings of green and dusk…
blooming in the field
of our shatter. You enter me
and it’s Macy’s,
some available version of infinity;
I enter you and I’m the grass,
covered with your shock
of petals out of which you rise
Mr. April Mr. Splendor
climbing up with me
inside this rocking, lilac boat.
My candlelight master,
who trembles me into smoke-violet,
as April does to lilac-wood.
(1998)
TONY HOAGLAND (BORN 1953)
Visitation