I wrote the first draft of this poem way back in 2007 (or so) after a couple of years of marriage (though we’d been dating since 1994 and will celebrate 31 years together in a couple of weeks)! I pulled it out when the subject of fantasy came up while recording this week’s podcast of Work From Bed Friday (subscribe wherever you get your podcasts). Here it is, in progress:

Married Sex

It’s like a goddamn rush hour in here

I’m biting the neck of the Alhambra delivery man 

I can taste his ionically balanced sweat

and there’s the waitress from Vic’s

whose voice tickles the inside of my thigh

then on an inhale leather and hay

Randy Baxley’s calloused hands under my panties

in the cab of his Ford pickup after

a party in Hairpie Canyon—

oh  wait—that’s my husband’s sweat I’m tasting

and we’re all alone in here

but now I’m in a corner of a dark red dive bar 

on a dirt road in Nevada leaning in to someone 

I’ve never met who drawls molasses and cups my ass

someone somewhere writes “tease me electronically”

there’s a tattooed bicep, a dirty firefighter, soft petal breasts—

a slow drip into a gem-like pool of desire

contained inside these porous conjugal walls

we levitate all the way up to the skylight

our naked bodies pressed into the starred black glass

so that for days after, the great wide-winged owl

will stare at the square tunnel to a strange world

where love is circular but sex is linear

or maybe sex is circular too or perhaps accumulative

as in every fragment of every caught breath

lies beneath my skin 

his

the hour rushes over us 

I collide with the carnal now

spent as a blown rose 

gazing up at the now owl-less glass 

to find ourselves reflected back

neck, bicep, thigh, panties,

breasts, ass, and calloused hands.