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Breaking

                                    Holly Virginia Clark


I woke to headlights sifting
through the blinds over the moonscape

of our bodies back-to-back, heel-to-heel,
and the crater at the center of the white sheets.

I thought of your penis like an infant
sleeping against your warm thighs,

thought of my tongue gliding you awake,
of the unsmiling self inside you that is beyond

pleasure and is the only thing my body craves.
I imagined myself a gun—how you might hold

your one earnest protection—or raw metal
in your hands, imagined the hardness of your eyes

on a weld, the steel unmaking itself
because you demand its surrender. How quietly

I guard my interior court in what I do
and leave undone. I nudged away from you,

listened for the even heft of your consciousless
breath and made my body break over

and over, each wave a languishing, a deliberate
explosion, an invitation and a curse.


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