TWO WORKS
BY BARBARA FLETCHER
________________
REVEALED
Wind creeps around concrete
darts across the pavement
and yanks up the woman's skirt.
People stop to watch her,
helpless, as the cloth lifts
like a kite into air,
white thighs and underthings
exposed to perverted play.
And the man in the blue suit
cannot help but stare
at the unintended exhibition,
cannot help but wrap his eyes
around the extent of shin and skin
stretching upward to the tiny pink
and polka-dotted panties
that she cannot cover with skirt
or hands or anything
in this suspended moment
when all is revealed to him.
________________
TERRAIN
She has never known this need:
to feel the texture of your tongue trace
a river over the topography of her shoulders,
to feel its journey over the pebbled path of her spine
mapping out each vertebra,
to feel the warm dampness of your breath
rise in clouds around each slight elevation of bone.
She has never known this desire:
to feel your mouth move over each square of skin, measuring,
to feel your lips search for freckled landmarks
as you chart each contour,
to feel your teeth mark out a legend
on the white expanse of her back, tasting
her geography, her terrain.
(originally published in the now-defunct online publication: Terrain,
July
1998.)