Klimt, by Chloe Firetto-Toomey

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti “Poetry as Insurgent Art”

The first time you hold
the hot, turgid weight of his cock
you feel powerful.

You feel most naked with your head on his chest,
face in a forest of hair on two neat pectoral pillows,
a finger rounding the small plate of his nipple.

The distance between you swells like bread.
You eat the body of one another, and it tastes like God.
Then, there is no distance between you.

This feeling continues,
even as bacon grease glistens
between spikes of stubble,

you think of him as a Gustav Klimt painting
eating breakfast after The Kiss, patterns of light
shifting through palm leaves.

***

Chloe Firetto-Toomey is an English-American poet, essayist, and MFA student at Florida International University. She is poetry editor of Gulf Stream Magazine and edits PANK. Publications include a collection of poems, Beyond Gravity 2001 Loebertas Publishing, England, and also appear or are forthcoming in, Crab Fat, Cosmonauts Avenue, Origins, Crannog, Sundog, and elsewhere. She lives on Miami Beach with her boyfriend and lots of edible plants.