Intimacy
Something about the night
Interlude
Aftertaste
means the sheets are heavy with sweat. So I lie in bed thinking of orgies—that night itself is a lubricated flesh. Remember the windows are open, the goblet is in the altar near the crucifix where the saints remain muted—the city reveals the skull in the shadows. In her garden the flowers wither, and the eyes of owls are staring. In the gutter a conch is shattered. Drunkards roam the streets searching for liver. All night, there is howling, there is molasses, the stench of smog in every nostril spreads. All night, the moon blooms with poison. She finds herself in the hole of this rusty needle.
I muse, I complain,
that there is something about the night.
The way it conceals the pebble and the dove from these prying eyes.
I could say, the moon is the mistress of the night—
watch how the moon glows above the monuments of rust.
Perhaps I would write another poem about the night,
tonight, something clear and more concise, for the night
is a coffin covered with a wreath of sunflowers inside
a white room with open windows overlooking a river with no water.
Every midnight, I prowl the streets, the avenues, of this city
of molasses; darkness is my womb of memories:
a cardiac arrest and an ashtray filled with cigarettes.
Most of the time I’m whispering here:
If I had only prevented her death, then
there would be the light of the sun in each
indented lines of poetry I write within
the tongue and venom of the night.
1.
Open your palms
offer yourself
to whatever that lurks
in the cathedral
2.
The wound waits
outside the door
after every rain
after each deluge
3.
The light seeks
the skull
the skull
in a prayer
Love.
I sought your voice
under the pillows scented
with your sweat.
I yearned for your saliva,
for your breath,
in the opaque corners of this room,
in empty bottles of gin
and chalices of cigarette ashes.
I looked for your lips
in the feathers of dead pigeons.
I searched for your pubes
in my soiled condoms
Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena spends most of his time on the road with his wife, Xandy.
Recent work can be found in Catamaran Literary Reader, The Bitter Oleander, Rust+Moth,
Lingerpost, and forthcoming in SkidRow Penthouse, Osiris, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.
