Julia Peters
is a nice girl from Brooklyn. Her fiction has been published in Clean Sheets,
Vox, Playgirl and others, under her name and a few alter egos. She is pleased
to have her first published poems appear in Mind Caviar.
E-mail
Julia Peters.
Heal, Hurt
It was my birthday and I
was lonely,
that cheap, selfish kind
of loneliness
you carry around at a party,
like your drink
in a real glass while everyone
else uses plastic
cups. You’re the host and
it’s your right,
despite all the love and
liquor around you,
to hold your disappointment
against your chest,
along with the perfume rising
from your cleavage,
lipstick kisses on your
collarbone. He might have seen
all of this, holding his
own kind of flask despite
being a guest. He stayed
after everyone had left,
and we began the deep sea
dive of a hook-up
amid the smoke and whiskey
in the floorboards
and our clothes, half-filled
bottles scattered by the bed.
In a dive, you make sure
you’re well-rigged, that you
can still breathe, that
the ocean’s surface is reasonable
enough to justify your entry,
although the world beneath
is unpredictable, unforseeable,
a crapshoot of manta rays
or coral reefs, a school
of lemon and turquoise fish, unclassified,
a problem with your oxygen
tank, a set of teeth buried
in your leg. I always thought
the choices were beauty
or pain. Instead this is
beauty and pain, stories and pain,
the whirlpool of kissing,
the shock of skin after so much
cloth, sleeping through
being touched and waking again
in the middle of it, wet
desire and hard fear teasing you both.
These things lie in us all
the time, a quiet ball
of knots, like when you
lie in bed on Sunday morning
pretending you are still
asleep. Hurt, warmth,
greedy lust and coming.
They are in us all the time,
waiting to be unraveled,
picked apart, with nails across your back,
with fingers coaxing the
cells in your earlobe
to want as much as the cells
between your legs,
palms that slap you back
into your life, a gentle fist
that plugs up the hole in
your heart as it slides inside you.
It all pours out through
your skin, ending in bruises of happy proof
in the long, sweet night
that has led
you to this empty, waking
Sunday bed.
Copyright
© 2002 Julia Peters. All rights reserved. Do not copy or post.
Men I Shouldn't Have Slept
With
On a good day, half, on a
bad day,
all. But mainly I know the
mistakes,
the way someone entering
therapy
thinks they know the mistakes,
a neat
laundry list, the excitement
of revealing
your errors, with no idea
of how naked
you’ll eventually be. The
recent one who pushed
his way into my life like
a Doberman trying
to get through a hatch cut
in a porch door
for a smaller dog, sleek
and insistent. A boy in high
school whose virginity I
took, packed in my
duffel for college and never
thought much of again,
like an unworn sweater or
the photos that don’t
get posted, although you
want them with you
at the time. The two right
after my marriage broke
up, one of whom still licks
the edges of my social life,
embers that don’t catch,
all these years later.
Some days more. Some days
different.
To say it, to a face, behind
a back, implies
something in them, milk
that had turned but I
drank it anyway--because
of thirst? because I
couldn’t tell from the taste?--
but it is something
in me, that wanted them,
that would want them still.
Copyright
© 2002 Julia Peters. All rights reserved. Do not copy or post.
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