vol. 1, 2007

Dorianne Laux

writhing between the couple on the subway platform, he:
her enflamed earner, she: on hiatus from the nuns, her
white shirt coming unbuttoned of its own torn accord,
a cadger in his crotch, blooming like a walloped dahlia.

Sex is crawling up the windowed stories of a courthouse in Kiev
like men in black-sashed robes, like women in jerry-rigged fig leafs,
the clouds above the onion domes caught on copper spires
like fat white zephyrs, their bellies slit open, shedding
curtains of gray rain. Sex is the heart’s dark aortic mascot

carrying its flask of Boles gin, a minx in the vein that crawls
down the leg, throbs on the inside of the thigh. It’s a beggar’s
bowl of thug and puff, a hoard of grooms with their heads
sunk deep in feather pillows, releasing a choir of chuffing snores.

Sex is everywhere like insects in the south, wings shirring
the heat-drenched antebellum air, like fireworks in a laundry basket
of folded underwear, confetti twisting on the wind as it makes
its way earthward on the first day of the new year to the freezing
streets of New York. You can’t stop it from steaming up through

sewer gratings or whistling through holes in the oldest bricks,
growing from cracks in the broken sidewalks or bursting
from soot-drenched chimney flues like a thousand swallows
churning in the orange blush dusk. It’s there on your sleeve,

dripping lamb’s juice and red wine, running off your chin
and staining your best vest. It’s the burr in the sock, the key
in the iron lock, the wedge of pie on a glued-together plate,
the white streaks in the bride of Frankenstein’s Mediterranean hair,
standing straight up in electric two-tone waves from the top
of her cobbled-together head.