MiPOesias Magazine

SCOTT HIGHTOWER

Scott Hightower’s third collection, Part of the Bargain, received Copper Canyon Press’s 2004 Hayden Carruth Award. He lives in New York City, is a contributing editor to The Journal and Barrow Street, and currently teaches at NYU/Gallatin and Drew University in New Jersey. He is currently hard at work on translations of the poetry of the Spanish-Puerto Rican poet Aurora de Albornoz.

. AT DOUG'S

The Austin summer sidewalks are starry ribbons
of sparkle; by night, hot dull tongues rolled out.
I loiter at your back screen like a neighborhood
boy asking if another can come out to play.

Colt skittish, at your sink, you greet me
and, after grazing my cheek with an air kiss,
you invite me to sit at the table and have a cup
of tea. You are lean and tan. Your chest
is covered with hair. The definition
beneath your shirt glistens in the heat.

A no-holds-barred overture for sex
would make you less nervous, but is not
my style. I ask for honey with my tea.
You chalk my simple assertions up to vanity
and the swagger of youth; would prefer
my provincial edges knocked away, would
prefer the reek of harsher experience. I get
the soap and suggest we bathe. Outside,
we take turns holding the garden hose.
The other soaps and either curls his face
down, submitting to the water, or arches
his throat and gasping face out and back.
Resistance washed away, you reluctantly,
give up and grant me one more night.

PASSION FRUIT

Your wild perfume precedes you purple in
the light. "Love" you almost say. Our poverty
rises up to kiss spring. Our nakedness
hears the water. We

murmur ("Take our loneliness away"): "Good
to see you." "Thanks for the fruit." None
larger than a hen's egg, they rest in your hands.
The hands, I want to kiss.

You smile, a razor I wish you'd drag across
me; slice me, showy, unusual radial;
licentious flower. A whorl of tendrils.
A crown, a stamen

of wounds, styles like nails. Papaya, granadilla,
sweet calabash, sweet cup, pomme d'or. Leave
off a sepal for betrayal. Felch. Leave off
a petal for denial.