When I was young, sex felt like swinging
between tops and bottoms of mouth sound
and honey cream. I was bear-hungry

in the candy shop, skin syruped &
proving that I was a place to buy and sell. My register
open. Dimes in my eyes. Bent over to sell me out

of validation and hopscotch.
I was simply transactional. Younger still, I remember
the pink squares drawn on the side of pools

filled with lemonade and one giant
straw for sucking
yellow light

into the belly while jelly
sandals flapped wet prints in circles
around all the mamas with their plastic

tits and glasses and my nanny
Amy—my gleaming perfect
nanny Amy—with her boombox,

her short shorts triumphant
against the chorus of daddies who sang
Her legs go all the way from the ground to her hips. 

What if I was that sex again, and not exhausted?
Not abandoned-car-lot-tired, not
a fatigued healthcare system reject,

not the she just stayed
to get rent paid, not
fire-season-is-the-easy-season

bleary eyed ho. What if by music
or something simpler like the ancient
clapping of the hands, I could return

to the pre-problematic and find an elbow.
A glowing elbow lightly dusted with hair.
His or mine or hers. Maybe then I could return

to the cathedrals
of skin—both marble cold
and mother-never-left warm

to contemplate a city
where each building
holds a part of me.

Behind a newly
painted door they’ve kept me.
Pigeons cooing on the windows outside.

The radiator like a ribbed beast
heaving on the inside. Kept in a room is me
as sex, and I am drawing maps

on the walls of all the places I will never be
in a dead-of-ending-night-blue
ink before I turn and say,