Sunday Night, by Ira Sukrungruang

—after Camille T. Dungy

Sex swung like that: like the pendulum
of her undone belt, like the fleshy parts
of our peeled nakedness.
Plush as worsted yarn in a cat’s claw,
sex. The swing, the canoe, the oily
trunk. Oil along swales and curves and crevices.
What leads and builds and crumples
into heaving blessed breath. A finger entering.
A tongue tip tasting. A sigh sung into
the clavicle. Deliver us
full, this sacrament.

***

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the memoir Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy and the coeditor of two anthologies on the topic of obesity: What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. His poetry collection, In Thailand It Is Night, was awarded the Anita Claire Schraf Award, and forthcoming from University of Tampa Press. He is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Emerging Writer Fellowship. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including Post Road, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com), and teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida and the low-residency MFA program at City University in Hong Kong. For more information about him, please visit: www.sukrungruang.com.