poetry

The Sexiness in the Heat of Summer. {poetry}

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These days come fast and hot

The humidity clutches at my insides, fills up my lungs

I have to remind myself to breathe most days… deeply

The stop-and-look-up-at-the-sky-notice-the-grass-beneath-you-take-note-of- the-flower-and-the-dragonfly-and-the-new-wrinkles-in-your-father’s-face deeply

I have to tear my eyes away from screens

Unless they are the window kind — collecting dew or the summer rain in their tiny little squares

I run my fingers across them like a Spanish güiro

There is a longing in this heat to dance

To run my hands over my hips and spin wildly in the street — a salsa

To get closer to each other

Close like I am kneading bread — pushing holes into focaccia, filling them up with salt water

I want to taste the salt on your lip

I want to catch the sweat that drips between my breasts like I am young and still searching the dark for lightning bugs — running and halting after each flicker and fade out

I want the heat aflame beneath my cheeks like a revolution

How breathing is hard here but the rapid inhale sounds like… victory

How the scorched earth slides into a cool mosquito breeze like the exhale after climax — the release

After holding in all the tension

The moon and its foggy haze a jaundiced glow

A stable direction, like how you know the way home without them… instinct

The swell of this season a sea in my bottomless belly thrashing boats to shipwreck

But I have battened down my hatches in this storm

And after every bellow of thunder and lightning streak, the green tinge in the sky looks like acrylic cans poured down from the heavens

Most days I wake reaching back towards dreaming, how I crave everything the world told me I couldn’t have

How every morning it is just within my grasp, blurred along the edges

If I could only stay here a little longer, tug the line a little harder

I would catch that monster

These days are a tug of war

Muscles heaving beneath their skin

To run

Like roots uplifting through the tar — the congealing ink we pour again and again and it steams in the sun like our boiling blood

They say the Italian girls have hot blood

Oh, how we rage

Our little bodies a violent ray of heat, we love like we burn… blistering

Tomato skins peeling away on the vine

Bursting delicious in the mouth

These days are a delicacy I want to move my tongue around — how it explores sensation… savoring

Would that I could savor your sweet-bitter mouth, your salt-tang and acidic teeth

That you would smile and lie back in the sun

These days I turn my face up and stare directly

Into the sun.

***

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Alise Versella

Alise Versella

Alise Versella is a twice Pushcart-nominated contributing writer for Rebelle Society whose work has also been published in Apricity Magazine, Crack the Spine, DASH Literary Journal, El Portal, Elephant Journal, Enclave, Entropy, Evening Street Review, Grub Street, Midwest Quarterly, The Opiate, Penumbra Literary and Art Journal, Press Pause Press, The Rail, Soundings East, Ultraviolet Tribe, What Rough Beast, Steam Ticket, Visitant, and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. She has recently published a poetry collection When Wolves Become Birds (Golden Dragonfly Press) and Maenad's of the 21st Century (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press) and was nominated for Sundress Pub’s 2021 Best of the Net award.
Alise Versella
Alise Versella

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