by Jennifer Funk
Brick is the color of the trunk lifting each sequined limb aloft, and brilliant is the color of the leaves seen shimming from the bed where you are taking me apart. I would have you bury me under your tongue. How often I wept in girlhood for unclaimed desires. The high, myopic whine in the word itself was intimate to me. What I've learned to keep to myself is little, ever-so inclined to skin myself open like a ripe orange. I trouble with good things, cannot let them just be. Like you, with your faithful mouth. Look at me here, splayed out in the back half of the bloom, fizzing with pleasure, pleasure scurrying through the skin like rats on fire. I would say I want you, but the truth is hotter, worse, is running for its life, every miserable nerve traveling down with the same worry-bomb: I'd rather miss you. From your honeyed mouth to my barbed mind, here at the edge of our greenery, would you always want a body so soft? So tenuous? You say you can stay, say you're going to for as long as I let you. ___
Jennifer Funk is native Californian trying to prove her mettle in New England. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, she has been a scholarship recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and The Frost Place. Recently awarded The Friends of Writers’ Levis Post-Graduate Stipend, Jennifer is at work on her first collection. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming at The Kenyon Review, The Cimarron Review, Four Way Review, Painted Pride Quarterly, The Boiler, Pangyrus, and elsewhere.