Matthew Dickman

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Your ankles make me want to party,

want to sit and beg and roll over

under a pair of riding boots with your ankles

hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather;

they make me wish it was my birthday

so I could blow out their candles, have them hung

over my shoulders like two bags

full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines

but smaller and lighter and sexier

than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge;

they make me want to sing, make me

want to take them home and feed them pasta,

I want to punish them for being bad

and then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling,

it will never happen again, not

in a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be

hurled into the air like a cannonball

and pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van.

Your thighs are two boats burned out

of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them

under the blue denim of your high-end jeans,

could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry.

Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas,

a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once

when I was falling in love with hills.

Your ass is a string quartet,

the northern lights tucked tightly into bed

between a high-count-of-cotton sheets.

Your back is the back of a river full of fish;

I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word.

Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone,

a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back

like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine

is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions.

When I place my fingers along it there isn’t an instrument in the world

I’d rather be playing. It’s a map of the world, a time line,

I am navigating the North and South of it.

Your armpits are beehives, they make me want

to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their honey,

their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark.

Your arms are the arms of nations, they hail me like a cab.

I am bright yellow for them.

I am always thinking about them,

resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your arms

of blue and ice with the blood running

through them. Close enough to your shoulders

to make them believe in God. Your shoulders

make me want to raise an arm and burn down the Capitol. They sing

to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse.

Each is a separate bowl of rice

steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck

is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet

and a throaty elevator

made of light. Your neck

is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven.

It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything

worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth,

which opens like the legs of astronauts

who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and one

voting districts of the Milky Way.

Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right!

—Matthew Dickman