Bunny Boisvert | poetry | What is a Man if Not a Moth with Rippling Muscles and a Great Ass?

What is a Man if Not a Moth with Rippling Muscles and a Great Ass?

        
        1.
I find you deep in Monongahela chopping wood for your stove. I am
naked under my coat except for my boots, which weave a trail back where
I came from. You tell me that's where I should go, and your voice is not a
voice but an amalgam of sorrows in the shape of sound. Swing your axe
behind your head and I long to be cleaved in two by your hands, big
enough to block out the moon. I want them holding my thighs open
against your flannel bedspread. Turn your eyes upon mine. They look like
licking a wall socket feels, red and round as two painted coins. Invite me
inside your cabin, I dare you, and I will saunter up the steps with my heart
in my hands. I am not leaving until you get on your knees. I am going to
make you fall in love with me.

        2.
You lean over my moonlit body like the Tower made flesh, crumbling
between my legs and I become Babel built up against destruction. Let me
speak in languages that don't exist yet, shedding my lace and velvet like a
silver skin, a carapace. My exoskeleton gleams under crystalline light like
the belly of an abalone shell. Acorns become trees, rain becomes rivers, I
become a red jewel against your forehead. Grass tangles itself into
baskets, sheep shear themselves, leaves whisper folktales to each other in
the breeze. Moonlight turns to crystal through open windows, letting in
cool forest air like a thousand invisible hands. They all touch me at once,
leaving an unseen trail for you to follow across my belly. I am first-born
and last-known but you see me under glassy light and I have you speaking
in tongues against the whorl of my ear.

        3.
After, we stare into darkness shoulder to shoulder, my body small and pink
against your illusory form. I throw a leg across your waist, you dig a huge
clawed hand behind my knee and we soak in an easy silence. Tell me we
can't keep doing this, but I was God-made for you to hold me like a dying
star. Let me curl up in your body and sleep there. Pull me up over your
body, I dip my tongue into the cleft of your sorrows where they taste like
strawberries and sweet wine. My lips come away sticky/shiny like jam.
Your eyes rake my body like two red spotlights, hands following in a slow
progression of silky admiration. You make me shake from my bones to the
top of by head to the tip of my starlit aura, arcing around me like Mary’s
dripping halo. Put your big hands around my throat and I will show you
what it’s like to fuck God. I am frivolous in my affection where you give
love like drawing water from a well. Something of an animal purrs inside
me when you touch my hot cheek with the backs of your fingers, stroking
the barely there laugh lines beside my eye.

        4.
You live in the shadows of trees and rivers, I exist in the breath of dogs
and a handful of blood. Be here with me now in moonlight and
wood-smell, grass and pine and a feral darkness in the doorway. I want to
keep you tucked into a locket like a braid of hair tied with a black velvet
ribbon. I rub my cheek against the fur at your shoulder. I am going to
show you what it’s like to be in love with an afterthought. Do you want to
be my husband and hold me by the back of my neck? Or will you kneel
before me and kiss the sharpness of my knees? Either way your mouth
will be on me somewhere.

        5.
And when will I leave you? When dawn breaks like an egg over the
mountains, trees sticky with golden yolk, I will slip on my coat and boots
and slink out into forest and sound. I will go back the way I came, just like
you told me, and when I get home I will press a kiss to the yellow-washed
lantern on the front porch and leave the door unlocked for you.