Emily Gordon
Crush
I was doing OK
till I saw you play.
YouTube is full
of your push and your pull.
A stage, a grave,
three feet of snow.
A voice like rocks.
Pickless, thumb ravenous.
These videos on autoplay
strip off the suburbs’ ovine
coat. But you’re a woolly wolf.
A tender ram. A cutie pie.
Your stance suggests, a hunch,
you’re not sucked off enough.
In recent years, fellatio
has joined my private reel.
“Since we can’t fuck, I want to know
everything about you”—I stash
this proposition just in case.
My past’s sole pluck in infidelity,
my shame in lustful thoughts.
Dumb rut. House wins. I’ll keep it
in my peanut, Deacon Jim.
But I tend to give off pheromones.
Your boy child is out of control.
I can see where he gets it. Live coals
in your skull, spring-loaded spine
braked. Hair high-voltage filaments.
Rock beats scissors. Paper beats rock.
Red-hot last sets, tour bus, seared meat
suffusing your memory. Of course
they got you. You should be tamed.
Too bad I came too late, missing
two thousand six, pressed up
to the front of the venue, as close
to the groin as I was when Iggy Pop
showed half his cock and spit on us.
You say you have stories. I can tell.
You’ve run from jealous husbands,
come to ready cunts, to women’s breath
and knees. Turn on the warning light,
recording: sweat, the center of the bra,
remixed so past and present overlay,
voices confused. Your wife’s a slim tulip,
rare arrow quivered, wrapped safe
in her resilience and your conjugation.
So why start conversations…well, I know.
Love jams. It gets you happy, hard.
You’re Jagger, Malkmus, Mould,
you want more, more, more—
not lovers, but lives. The scorch
of baby back ribs, the woofer blown,
the ears to take your stories.
A lust for your blurred sound.
Your friendly eyes have hooks.
They jarred me up, awake.
I’m filling fast.
You haven’t asked.
I don’t wreck homes.
Except in poems.
Emily Gordon is working on a musical set in 1920 and a memoir set in 2010. She lives in Brooklyn.
This poem is not previously published.