Ignition

Take me fast, quiet,

two guards at every door.

Wrap me tight

in your extravagant straitjacket,

where the strangling is clean

and silent, since when I kiss,

it will not be as a sister.

You have seen my complete dossier.

I would have made a great man,

but I am a woman,

subtle but effective.

Do not toss me, deranged,

in your landfill;

it is more palatable to give

me something rich

and strange, tribal,
like a Viking funeral.

tk, from my chapbook "Unpressed"

R.A.D. curled up on the steps with my book...

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arabesque of the spine

 A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body. 


― John Updike, Pigeon Feathers: And Other Stories