You are a
young raspberry vine.
Your small red berries taste
sour,
free,
happy.
And I chew them up and swallow—
I’ve taken so many berries from you.
Domingos
That smile, small and butter yellow, seemed tacked up on walnut eyes that peered out in uneven lines. The kind of decorum they sell at roadside stands along green highways in the south; the kind that makes you feel at home if you grew up poor—like those plaques with bad quotes that get hung up in the kitchen, the only thing drawn to them is the airborne grease from home-style recipes. And a year down the line, these signs grow gray with heavy dust like the color of the bags under those walnut eyes. The color of wear, like it must have been a second-hand stand. Like he must have been passed around before.
Borrowed Mattress
I grabbed her hips—
she bit my lip hard enough
to make me squirm, but soft
enough to leave no trace
of herself on my skin.
Heavy breath poured from
young lungs and twisted up—
intertwined—following suit, our
legs buried beneath the sheets.
It was that time of night, the time
when I like to be sound
asleep; the time when she’d have
thought about it too.
Not my hands or her teeth
or the mess of our legs,
it was just that time. And we’d had this
same night, three nights in a row,
and I had to say it before she
had to leave for good. Maybe
it was because of the way I like my books—
with clean pages and clean endings.
This weekend, our weekend,
deserved the same.
Modern Poets Magazine 