Spit

Her profile reads In town for the weekend
 trying to feel something—

a challenge or a plea, contingent on
the interlocutor. Asking anyone to make you

feel is one way out, though the execution
is a mixed bag. Where does anyone empty

their want of its brutal clarity?
Week 3 of government shutdown:

visitors off-road at Joshua Tree, carve
new desire paths in the absence of rangers

The FDA has quit inspecting food, & so
we may as well fill our mouths

however we want, empty our fantasies
into whatever expanse is left

Big sky & all that

Another’s spit & all that

Desire furloughed from sense

I take my desire to the poetry reading

& I take it to swallow fog at the riverfront

& I take it to therapy

& I take it to the mother country, weep under a statue of beloved Mayakovsky
who shot himself thru the heart, though it may have been a state coverup

& I take it to yr bed, say Do whatever,
by which I mean Get me out of here

Desire meaning longing fouled

Desire porous as memory

Desire histrionic & dire as a stormcloud bursting

Desire a song insistent on skipping

Desire a faulty talisman wrapped around my heart chakra

Desire a wedge btwn me & industry

Desire a consummate switch

Spent desire whooshes gravity
from the body, though I wouldn’t know

Mine keeps reproducing itself, refracts back
from the deep space of what else?

Alina Pleskova is a Philadelphia poet and the author of What Urge Will Save Us (Spooky Girlfriend Press, April 2017). 

Image: BKL ART via Flickr (cc)