January, 2013 | San Francisco, CA
Third Wheel
~K
From behind his glasses he’s thinking
about fucking you. He grips the belt holes
of your jeans as you dance, probably
picturing how your thigh will fit his hand—
the outer edge of his pinky will graze
the lowest-down hairs—
or how your breasts might take
on a life of their own when he releases them
from your shirt. Your hips grow wilder.
If I leave the club now, I can get to Portland
by 11am. My last lover will barely be awake.
If there is a girl in his bed I will notice
the color of her hair. Maybe I will throw a glass
or huff in the corner. Maybe I will shape
myself into the letter “u” at the foot of his bed.
If he is alone, I will forget my relationship
to loafers and peanut butter sandwiches,
announce yes, of course I will eat it.
I will face the wall when he enters me
without any regard for which hole
he finds first. I will picture
your hips, moving in concentric circles
to this lousy pop song, and try to
match my movements to yours. Try
to summon hunger, like when you
open your mouth to meet his without expectation
of his prickly, too-short beard or the
patterned tossing of his body at night
or the blackheads you will one day
squeeze free from his back as he sleeps.
You delight in the newness
of this moment, all the potential
roads to heartbreak. I try to feel
what you feel, ass thrusting against him.
*
February, 2013 | San Francisco, CA
The Art of Falling in Love
~A
And you and I lay on the grass
and mapped the way men remake
our bodies and you and I
felt the slickness of bare skin in water and you
should have learned by now
how to be more careful with your heart
I think to myself
and that’s just the trouble with you—
it won’t stick to just one person—
becomes everyone, like I does sometimes
reaches, hums, and collapses.
So yes, I am not sure I want to share
his hand on my thigh
with your imagination
(his beard wasn’t prickly and you know
I won’t be popping blackheads)
but I want to tell you
we could fall in love if we wanted—
we only have to find the right man
and then stare past him
*
May, 2013 | Half Moon Bay, CA
Birthday
~K
In the firelight tiny white wings
sprout from my back,
cherries bloom at the nape
of my dirty throat. I don’t know
how to be graceful. Spread wide
like Jesus was—horny
and misunderstood.
The number 33 is a sentence,
stern mustache twitching,
maybe even leather.
Don’t bring sex into this poem—
not now, K. Hundreds
of children fall down
on me like rain, I try
to grab ahold of just one
bony thigh. I chase them
like a harem of gulls, like water
from a wide hose. Here I am
insisting again on my own version
of wetness, piling damp cotton
in the sand. Stark and skinless,
I summon the moon’s spotlight,
chase every living thing I see
still begging: please be reckless with me.
*
June, 2013 | MacDowell Colony, NH
If every scar
~A
on your arm could be wax
dripped stung and then smoothed
could be speed bumps across borders
or a language read by touch
but even I have not run my hand along your arm
I have not traced your vision—
that is so many others
oblivious to crows to the irrationality of noon
and birthdays and bodies and I
(say it enough and it’s a war cry)
to flesh like the taste of goat
to the sunset as a bloodletting every night
*
September, 2013 | San Francisco, CA
Your Bloody Heart
~K
Sometimes when I sit next you
I want to lean my chest against your heart,
feel the blood-heat rushing beneath.
Or rather I want to peel back the skin
that holds your breasts, high like mine,
and extract each ventricle, secret it for my own.
In so many ways we see the same sky,
the bruising before rain. We need
the same volume of words to parse
our wild minds. We treasure
tiny intimacies, dinner and forgiveness.
But when it comes to our hearts—
that sullen meat—we are different.
Yours is a girl who’s just discovered
the powers of her body, young but not innocent,
a French girl walking in tall boots.
And while I wouldn’t call mine ulcerous,
what other name for such confusion?
My heart so willing to yield to laziness
or disgust, to concede to small pleasures—
television and cheese.
When you wrap your legs around a man
your heart doesn’t judge you.
And when you near the water’s edge,
it will submerge you even faster
than your poems instruct.
My heart is still on the shore, aroused only
by the image of my own behind
reflected in a lover’s eye or
my delicate relationship to power.
I am forever mourning romances
with cities and Jews, but you
are not interested in grief.
Your heart is bloodied from yearning
and surrender, so many minor wars.
Some days you bleed a trail behind you—
tiny red ants only my eyes can see.
*
November, 2013 | Molokai, HI
Reminder, or, we are not our hearts
~A
though they may tell us
the most monumental of stories.
We are the parts of our bodies tracing fear-desires—
your neurotic lips, my neurotic fingers.
Your mind helium-high, the intricacy
of miniature painting, mine always longing
for the vastness and clarity of tides—
both, mercury and fluorescence.
We are our visions of children, our hunts
across the plains, the earth balanced on our palms.
We are both our hungry eyes,
our upturned asses. Both our longing bellies.
Strange Picasso mirror-images.
Kiki Vera Johnson received her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and her poetry has appeared in Southeast Review, Hot Metal Bridge, The Fiddleback, and elsewhere. She works as a part-time editor and designer and full-time mama to a 3-year-old in the woods of Western Massachusetts. She is expecting her second son any day now.
Ariana Nadia Nash is the author of the poetry collection Instructions for Preparing Your Skin (Anhinga Press), which won the 2011 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, as well as the chapbook Our Blood Is Singing (Damask Press). Her work has been published in The Boiler, Rock & Sling, Poet Lore, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Cimarron Review, among other journals. She currently teaches at SUNY Buffalo and has previously taught at University of Chicago and UNC Wilmington.
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