By Brad Aaron Modlin

Featured Art: Emaciation by Brooke Ripley

Yes, everyone says to add “in bed” to end
everything with sex, but all I think of is
the deathbed. Your hard work
will soon pay off
in bed. Great surprises await
in bed. Your experiment’s results
will reveal themselves
in bed. When I Christmas-visit
my parents, who love me in ways I
can’t understand, they say,
“We don’t want to leave you
a lot of junk to sort through
[when we die],” so when they dial
Chinese takeout, I suggest pizza.
No cookies.
I think about it all January. It’s still
that January, I think, I’m only in the middle
of it. If you say you’re in the middle,
you assume you know the end date,
that’s why religious Southerners say, “Lord
willin’” when making plans.
In a college poem, I made
the Gingerbread Man pickup lines about lic-
orice. I was afraid to rhyme cookie
with nookie, embarrassed by words
that might be 40–90% crass?
Afraid to expose myself
to danger: our Shakespeare
professor defined la petite mort.
I was afraid to talk about
death. My Brit Lit professor
angered me by saying,
“It’s all sex, death,
and madness,” so I yelled,
“People fully clothed
and alive under rainbows of sanity!”
Even I didn’t realize at the bar
the Gingerbread Man was flirting
with the fox.
No matter who writes the story,
everyone dies. I am too old
to find this so surprising.
Too young to keep repeating
the crassest word.
Too waste-averse to ask the fortune
teller to flip my cards
on her front porch. Congratulations!
You are on your way
in bed. All your troubles will pass quickly
in bed. Stormy seas ahead
in bed. You will find bliss
in bed. Love is around the corner
in bed. Love is around, love is.

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Brad Aaron Modlin’s books are Everyone at This Party Has Two Names and Surviving in Drought. His writing has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, The Buxton Contemporary Art Gallery in Australia, The Slowdown with Ada Limón, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. The Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska, Kearney, he teaches (under)grads, curates the visiting writers series, and gets lost on familiar streets.