Perverse Pleasure

Green Night By Edward Hirsch Issue no. 182 (Fall 2007) (Summer, 1982) We walked down the path to breakfast. The morning swung open like an iron gate. We sat in Adirondack chairs and argued for hours about the self—it wasn't personal— and the nature of nature, the broken Word, the verse of God in fragments. We trotted back and forth to readings. The trees were the greenest I had ever seen. We cut bread from a large brown loaf at a long wooden table in the mountains. A farmer hayed the meadows and the afternoon flared around us. Pass the smoky flask. Pass the cigarettes: twenty smouldering friends in a package. We swam in the muddy pond at dusk. The sky was a purple I had never seen. Someone was always hungover, Scheming with rhymes, hanging out. Nothing could quench our thirst for each other. At the bonfire, we flamed with words. The houses were named after trees. I slept with someone at the top of a maple. It was a green night to be a poet in those days. We didn't care if the country didn't care about us. Image: Pinterest

Perverse Pleasure

Diffused love
by Suchi Govindarajan
:::::::::

To grow up without cold seasons is
to find an obsession dusted with snow
For too long, my sun kept drawing shadows
But in my dreams, I would see tree trunks
branching into fragile hands
my bare prayer held up against the white

I imagined the weighted blanket of it
how it might quieten my heart's chaos
make my longings more calm and austere

In days when sunspots flecked my lashes
and the sand felt blister-rough as though it
would fuse into glass and catch the glare,
I dreamt of becoming a migrant bird
compelled to find routes away from the sun
I would follow every winter wind and current
And as calendars faded to blue-ink endings,
I would fly to lands full of diffused light

Like the Earth, I too would complete my orbit
pulled by a strange and foreign love.

Perverse Pleasure

The Root of Mother is Moth
By Terese Svoboda
Issue no. 106 (Spring 1988)

At dusklight she slips
into acetate underclothing,
all rustling.
                Has she slept
all day? Or is that housedress
draped over the hassock warm? From her motion,
  one of submission, her pale arms
                 upraised, the slip sliding,
           talc issues invisibly.

Mother is faceless so far up in the dark.
Just her torso glows,
and the color around her takes on the design
of a falling leaf, grey-yellow plaid.

     From the mirror, she draws what little light
there is inside her, and sighs.
                           But she is really very young
                 and will think so later.

Now nothing can claim her.
               I am quiet, all chrysalis,
                         hidden in her closet.