By Mark Cox
Featured Art: Untitled by Vija Clemins
In your prime, shape presents itself first,
the angle and curve of one thing,
the size of something else,
or the way her hair flows volcanically
along each subtle slope and swell.
It is crazed, intense, super-heated,
even the soles of your boots feel sticky,
because she’s entered you, you know this,
she charts the very map of your blood,
and that eyelid twitch you have going,
they’ll claim is stress and dehydration,
but it’s her, pal, all her, she floods places
you’ve never named in yourself,
she proffers the pulse, the duende, the élan,
that jackhammer of lust
outside the Fiesta Ware outlet. . . .
But one day, it just happens,
a man’s eyes cloud and change,
you don’t feel with the same ardor
the way she moves, her confident posture,
no, suddenly it is color you notice,
the grays, the yellows, the bruised surfaces
tinged with a silver-green, almost a tarnish,
as if her skin were a metal,
and not such a precious one, either,
more like pewter or the common alloys
of soot-smudged medieval artisans,
something to be re-shaped, hammered thin,
become useful and used.
Read More