Affair
by Ash Durrance
No one tells you that the heart makes foul meat.
Or that to be young is to be gold-spun by whiskey and lust:
a married man, my dorm room, and rain falling into fangs on the street
where weeks before I’d been struck by a car and flown like a sheet.
On my bed the man’s body was a lie I told myself to trust,
his mouth a rim of pink glass lightning leaves when it strikes
and when he called my name, a double drumbeat
to the wall, the vowels clung to the copper pipes like rust
and I felt beyond the brick, across the courtyard, the concrete
simmer and knew as the cannibals do what it is to feast.
Isn’t there always power in things most unjust?
He was a bird whose legs were ropes strung across a fishing fleet
and the day’s thin cloth was a sail my sorrow soon would crease.
I want fragrant petals, gunmetal, and lime to crush
between my teeth, and a wild boar skinned of her red meat
to climb into before I cross another busy, panting street.