Peach

My tongue, your ass:
the center of a peach,
ripe, soft, pitted, red-fibred flesh,
dissolving toward earth, lust.
Eat you? I ask.


Not the End of the Story

Lying on you naked, naked skin to skin,
as on damp ground in early evening, or at the bottom of a well
that seeps cool water sweat at summer’s dry end.
The candle burns down low, a blue methyl beryl
flame deep in the well. In the story the witch said,
Dig up my garden, split my wood, go fetch
my blue light that never goes out, lost in the well.

Deep under me, you breathe out words to catch
my hands. The night fills up with rain, a soft risk
against the brick walls of sky. You sleep. The flame
is shaking blue, my last pleasure of the night: to watch
with my face sideways on your breast, your skin calm
as wet dirt under me, to go to sleep before the candle goes out.


Sharp Glass

Shattered glass in the street at Maryland and 10th:
smashed sand glittering on a beach of black asphalt.

You can think of it so: or as bits of broken kaleidoscope,
or as crystals spilled from the white throat of a geode.

You can use metaphor to move the glass as far as possible
from the raised hands that threw the bottle

for their own reasons of amusement, or despair, or the desire
to make a cymbal crash in the ears of midnight sleepers.

Or you can use words like your needle, the probe curious
in tough heels, your bare feet having walked in risky places.

You can work to the surface the irritant, pain, the glass
sliver to blink in the light, sharp as a question.


Order Information:
We Say We Love Each Other
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
 

Is available from:

Firebrand Books
2232 S. Main St. #272
Ann Arbor, MI 48102-6938
Phone:    248-738-8202
firebrand@firebrandbooks.com
http://www.firebrandbooks.com

paper ISBN 0-933216-13-0
cloth ISBN 0-932379-73-7