Skin Is

Your body’s largest organ.
It is obvious

you know this
as I lie here pressed to you,

aorta stretched and beating on
my arterial tree.

Your limbic lobe pushing
against my medulla.

I can imagine it—
your epididymis

touching the mirror
of my Gartner’s Duct, if only

it could. We are homologues
and you could turn

inside out, pelvis retrograde
against my iliac crest.

We could stay like this yet
it is this expanse of skin,

the cutaneous portal that is
a diving board

to a deep pool so I press
wide against you

brain fixed to lie
in wait, patient for the flush

to my subcortical floor.
You know what to do.

***

Less

The girls walk through the field,
legs brush against tall grass,

sauntering like horses,
heads falling back, careless

they laugh, scanning clouds
moving at the same

barely perceptible pace
that they do.

More wordless each day,
the boys’ eyes sweep

through the grass to the girls,
voices too far away to hear

yet they stand stunned
and wanting

even if it is to be stung
again. The girls

always do their damage
yet the boys watch them

lope, slow to the trees
at the field’s edge.

The girls do not change
their cadence,

strides pulling them
into the expanse of branches,

into a denseness
that must suffocate the sun.

The leisure of their disappearance
is as gradual and reckless

as a tide. Silence swells
around the boys,

left to wonder about
the great draw of these trees.

It’s ruthless
being suspended at fifteen,

being pared down in dulled
and dreamless skin

even as their interior bodies boil.
They are aimless,

yet they wait for the girls
to emerge from the trees

again. They wait,
as if, for less.

***

Susan Alkaitis’s poems are forthcoming in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Illuminations, and Lakeshore. She recently won the Causeway Lit Poetry Award, and her work has been published in Rattle, The Last Leaves, The Punch-Drunk Anthology and 2River View among others.