Issue/Publication: How to Get Heat Without Fire, forthcoming as well in Packing Light: New and Selected Poems

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Bad Sex

        "There's no such thing as bad whiskey or bad sex."  Roland Flint

We were screamers that year.

Gina, the lady downstairs,

told me when we woke her and her truck-driving boyfriend,

she'd get angry with him about our shaking the house--

"Why can't you do that for me?"

1970, a year Reich would have envied.

Beethoven's Ninth in sex, loud, deaf to others,

Mike the nineteen-year-old cowboy from Teaneck,

me, twenty-five.

Nights he didn't come five times he felt

pent up.  For me,

it was the beginning of life in the body,

genesis, exodus from a dry marriage,

numbers and revelations.

Once, in a New Brunswick flophouse,

high noon, we sweated so hard the soaked sheets

slid off the plastic-covered

mattress and so did we.  Wetness and the smell of sex

permeated the year like a rain forest.

How did it end? Tired.

In a frenzy of suspicion I read his diary--

I knew it!  He'd cheated on me

with a woman from his office.  She wore red gloves

he wrote, he came five times.

Now I'm older stats aren't the key.

Yet I hold to 1970, sex so good

my whole body and the next life and the next,

pre-reincarnated, came.

Even today I wear red gloves

as a tribute to that unknown woman

who took the next shift

and as a way of saying, thank you, Mike.