Michelle Bitting: Ode to Sex with You

I have opened you like a child kneels in the sand 
and pries the oyster’s doors for the first time 
spying the pearl
your hips cleaved
butterfly wide, my eyes
two painted wings
reflecting war in every tender shade of coral
I blaze and take flight
coast your legs
the inlets of knees
the secret scrub of your thighs
the sculpted valley between
I am a seagull
diving for what’s buried inside—milky liquor
a fleet taste of ocean
iodized air, filaments of breeze
and brine gathered on the feathers of terns
I peel this out of you
I lick the lambent streams from your softest panels 
I lose my head
and gasp, dizzy with gusts
the staggered groans flowing in currents
over sun-smoked shores
our risen eddies
the way your mouth is trying to say something
lips two wild pulsing fish
swift bubbles of nothing
moaned into the air’s
naked ear
I am swimming fast
down your steepest leagues
my rage for heaven and particles
a school of tongues darting, circling
the labored-after grandeur
the thousand breaths
the abyss of bells
it could take a life-time to seize them
to ring them all

Michelle Bitting’s books include Broken Kingdom (Catamaran, 2018).

Copyright 2020 Michelle Bitting.