Almost Like They Wanted It
–Camille T. Dungy

Because she’d heard him laugh through new moon darkness

and she knew he’d fallen and she knew, before she turned,

he’d be crawling, like a crawdad, rock to loam—

because she tried to love the straight back and neck

he’d erected to recollect the man he’d been

before—because she found herself adding up his usefulness

like some kind of auctioneer—she showed him

the dark coils areoling both her breasts and all the ways

she bent and lifted, bent and lifted, steady, strong.

She let him believe he was past due for a harvest

and her hands were the right ones, now, to hold onto the scythe.

                                                        •

She made quick work of pleasure. The boysmile bunked down

in his eyes, she claimed. Her tongue found the place in his mouth

where the teeth were gone—where he’d hold his corncakes

until they grew soft enough to chew. History had bedded him

in all of this—his own history and failures not his own.

Before he’d tramped in she’d watched another man—a man she’d thought

she’d hated—watched his body opened, opened, opened until

blood had married brine. She’d watch that man be whipped into something

good for nothing more than fertilizing clay and she’d thought

buckshot would have been a brand of kindness if sprayed into him

just then. But even after his hard going, she did not miss him very much.

                                                        •

Anyone she chose could be shucked like surplus property tomorrow,

but that hadn’t been enough to warn her off of picking him that night.

Because she knew if she set her sight on nothing she’d get nothing

in return, she’d walked with him. But because the night progressed so

—because there were some clouds—no stars—no moon—he’d tripped

over the branch of a dead and down tree. In all that darkness,

there, without a moon, even then, she had not fallen. She thought

to say so, but she did not say so. She did nothing

but say she was sorry for him. She did not use her mouth

to say this. Could he not listen to her hands? They spoke softly,

articulating her condolences, to his torn and bleeding skin.