That slick monster sat down with us all.
A man wants to know mouth-first
what my face does looking at him,
if my eyes are cogitating wells
of sweet soup. He imagines me forward
then bent as in over. The idea is I’ll say yes,
go to the car for unbuttoning
but a wife flashed back in the way.
So I don’t visit the details of convention.
When I say I like a man who knows
what he wants, there’s nothing more
about him to like. Nowhere else to be,
I stand under the snow face-
first, the mouth my summoning shrine.
Copyright © 2019 by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 18, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.