LIGHTS ON
standing in the glow of the refrigerator light I take the cold peach hands shaking and tongue it like a fruit for the fruit of it with a cavernous mouth opening lips dripping with saliva like frost hanging off the rooftops of a house I twirl the peach in my hands thinking only of the pit in the center surrounded by two pulpy buttocks of peach meat I eat the meat and yes it drips down the sides of my mouth its juices running down the center course of my cleavage I stick my finger down in between my sloe gin breasts and
                                                                     I suck
while the back of my throat plays a decadent cartwheel ecstatic in its tart journey its lighter then I expected darker then I thought with grooves enough to outlast the madness I crave by digesting it so
                                                                      I hesitate
the refrigerator glow doing a hand job around my bathrobe exposed in the light mouth open I shift from one foot to the other linoleum floor sticky beneath my feet I swallow the pit and dance with it clobbering my walls a hurricane rises underneath the small hairs at the nape of my neck I rock slowly back and forth head back eyes closed mouth open I swing the refrigerator door shut
LIGHTS OFF

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Must obtain permission in order to reproduce

Trace Weatherford lives in Huntington Beach, California and has been published in ONTHEBUS, Spillway, Voices, as well as in recent issues of Gumball Poetry. She enjoys attending poetry readings where she "drinks in the written word like rubies and juice."

Six Days
Martha Christina

Like sand
thrown against a tin roof
rain began faintly.

Black cloud,
she of the multiple stories
of weeping, wringing
her coarse hands.

After six days
I knew
the smell
of rain's skin

Then, suddenly, the pressing blue sky;
its great weight
silencing everything.

© All Rights Reserved
Must obtain permission in order to reproduce

Martha Christina is on the Creative Writing faculty at Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI where she also served as Advisory Editor for Calliope. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner; Zone 3, Connecticut Review, Earth's Daughters and Passages North among others.