On Wednesday she sweated
in his city flat, wrenching
away from ugly lust. She can’t
keep her promises. Oshun’s teeth
have gone brackish as this burrough’s
gutters and she sends no charms for rescue.
She clogs his toilet so a stubborn tampon
floats and floats, celebrating porcelain,
recording deceit, threatening to display
the stuff behind the puckered nipple,
the pimpled thigh, the gristle
that ripples over skeletons of sirens.
She appraises herself in jagged glass,
an apparition perched in the angles
of his humid square. Picks dung
from under her nails and flicks it
at their twisting bodies, knotting
sheets at ankles, desperate to forget
all outside this room, desperate
to remember its clumsy streetlight shadows.
She is ashamed of us. Regrets
our fumbling, our elbows stapled
to feathertops, haphazard knees grazing
a scrotum, kisses that inch away
from themselves. Oshun fingers her moles
and crow’s feet. Drags ragged nails
across the radiator’s flaked beige paint,
music for our stupid barren hump.