I eat them bent over the sink
with a spoon, naked usually
and their fluoresce drips from my mouth
down my chin, to my chest, and makes my lips itch
and my hands
and my tongue.
I swallow,
and Pleiades glows, hot, blue, all of her,
and grants me just one wish:
a rose gold platter. A ping, a pondering in
a pause that dawns
my awning, a glass that’s glowing, fluorescing like a promise
or a hot blue predilection that
thrust in my face
might feel like
permission.
Want knows futile, knows fleeting, knows
fucking that tastes like fruit that drips
then leaves you on read. Call it a perversion.
She knows perversion, and she knows willing,
has practiced stoicism, and can swallow
what hurts: the hard, the thick and its gravel.
Inside desire goes to seed—sweet fleshy folds
that dawn fruit—fecund, pink, and dew
that glistens, granatis—a rose nests in a lotus—
and both are the color of peonies
and neither is the platter
and they turn their phones off
and spend weeks inside each other
because neither are wanting, because both are allowed to eat
words like reciprocity, permission,
promise, and delirium.
Outside, Pleiades wanes
and a pelican pricks her breast, and when he eats, she swallows.
It doesn’t sting,
the red, the dew—
Sometimes, it itches.
Photo by Shlomo Shalev on Unsplash
