We court with caution knowing a bite too dear
or linger too long could grind her soul
more hollow than we had hoped
awakening a fondness to join my ravenous walk through sunless centuries.
So much of young love dances across a selfless sink
where the taker holds back from fulfillment
to empower such flesh who chooses to submit.
We keep her sheets unwrinkled as we walk
night in the garden of the moon
where our tattoos find they fit into one another as if
the Wyrd herself had guided the needles’ punctuations.
Each night our meandering from dark moon to new
then to pieces of eight on a slender man’s chest onto
quarters which my innocent offers me as slivers of pentacles.
At halving time I could feel power shifting
though tribbling, I held on to the overwhelm of sex and species.
Succulent spines glowed under bluish light that battered our naked bodies.
At the point of quarters three her flush seemed to yellow to the hue and tone of her alluring locks.
She promised our separate angles would diamond once the moon fell full
as flashes of our flesh sparked, my hunger, it seemed, could no longer hold back.
Yet I held as the moonlight’s swelling grew
with the poppy blossoms turn to red from gray
the moon disrobed to spread her sweetness
over the mauve and maroon datura bloom
in harmony against the midnight candy of white phlox.
Our climax I was sure would be to the night glow of tuberoses and nicotiana
against the soundtrack of nightingale arias.
When stars moved with us among the fragrances and
ephemera of flowerings
she and I probed our private patch.
We embraced to the rising of the solid moon.
My fangs glinted just as did hers to
her destiny as she wolf, the alpha in yellow,
that our forbidden love may bite its way into the future,
birthing fresh predators oddly formed
to feed upon the next manifest of the human herd.
Tyson West is a poet and fiction writer who lives in the flood plains of Eastern Washington. He especially enjoys visiting graveyards and researching the stories behind the dead. To support his writing addiction, he works in real estate. As part of his work, he sometimes has to locate missing relatives of deceased persons. This often involves searching through their residences in an effort to find some lead to their family members who, in some cases, they do not wish to know of their passing.
Published 2/14/20