My First One Night Stand

It was late, but not late enough for closing time,

And we were just two young old people

with half too many beers and the heat of cinnamon schnapps

fogging our decisions as we sang too loudly to that Gotye song.

He leaned forward in his chair, beaming grin, stubble on his chin,

and pressed his leg way too hard into my thigh.

Game on, my brows answered before my tongue.

And that’s when we left the building.

For me to make a play and

wrap myself around him from behind.

For his breath to hitch just before he turned

to unleash a trail of kisses down my neck, and

strike a flame with the match-head of his finger, burning

slowly along my desire, down the valley between my breasts,

over the plains of my belly, and finally smoldering inside me.

In a blink we had voyeurs; a mommy-daddy date night,

gone terribly right as some stick-figure bumper-stickered gold Suburban

paused mid-street to enjoy a rarely-seen public mating ritual of the dark and urban jungle.

We proudly gave them quite a show,

until he licked his fingers clean of me while dialing for a cab,

attempting words from his mouth as I distracted him with the

flesh from the back of his neck gathered gently between my teeth.

And when the cab arrived, there appeared no driver present

as we tinkered and played with one another in the back seat of the car

before unwrapping each other as candy

In the industrial concrete stairwell of his building

where the current could no longer be contained

between our male and female circuitries.

We nearly melted the metal rails we held to,

As we soldered ourselves together.

And then: everything the way it was before.

His door closed, our clothes off, contemplating the pleasure of the couch,

but pulled into that too-familiar hallway on the left, and the room directly to the right.

Into those same blue sheets, nibbling, pulling, drinking in

the man I’d missed for months.

Mine, again.




+Written on 8/30/2012 for Jeff Epley's Fall 2012 Intermediate Poetry class. The assignment was to capture narrative elements in the poem.