Alana Merritt Mahaffey

excerpts from “Attraction”

(from the section “All is Fair”)

87. (M_______/Early Spring, 96)

My M________, when you
lift yourself from the
professor’s raisin body,
(feeling the cold of his
wedding ring on your inner thigh)
is it still Mencken and Oates
he recites, or something
sweeter? He works the
circumstance cautiously while
you wrap hollow legs
around could haves.
     Like a black widow
you spin threads around truth,
subdue and shoot the venom in,
let it liquefy.
     You suck fetid love
from a carcass; he
wraps you carefully
and hangs your shell
like a trophy.

104. (T________/Late Fall, 1996)

So I tell you it’s okay this time
because you’re tall, and
your wife thinks
I’m a bitch and your teacher
is as pretty as you say, and
it’s borderline romantic,
so I wish it could be me
you were kissing, but,
her lipstick is already there—
the hieroglyph of 5 minutes
across her office couch.
     She says sex with you
is a B++ (better
than him) and she doesn’t
know or want to know
that I’m the repository
for your play-by-play accounts.
     This time I tell you it’s okay,
and pile this secret in a box with others
because you trust me, love me,
(more than both of them) and I
swear not to tell, already
having pinned you
in a poem.

66. (Mr. _____________/Spring, 94)

At the chalkboard you boast
Dickens and/or Dixon, but
I burn like Ms. Havisham
for the boy who dropped
two days ago, and I never
knew his name. In the library,
you come from behind,
pointing to the clock, 11:05,
then soft like a snake charmer
it’s your palm moving
to the small of my back;
I constrict and
imagine my hands
like piranha, then
the reaction of a dean
who won’t know.
     Your hand curves a
trail to my leg. I
strike like a cobra.

(from the section “Almost”)

212. (Unknown bookstore clerk/Late Summer, 99)

$11.27 and I imagine your arms
sliding around me and the slow burial like
a crocodile on his belly
into the river at dusk.
  I give you money, exact change, and touch
as much of your hand . . . A green M&M
leaps from the pocket on my backpack,
rolls across the counter,
and, joking, I say you can have it.
     And, joking, you throw it onto your tongue
like candy-coated sex, but I melt. When
eyes meet like this,
I don’t care about cliché.

230. (S_________/Early Winter, 99)

Your girlfriend thinks I’m nice
and I am but I want to
borrow you, long hair
and legs and lips like
Dietrich; you sing
love-me-true songs on stage
like a Siren, like a Saint,
and the lights flash
blue then red then blue
against your skin;
your fingernails, too long,
scratch on the guitar’s strings.
     We hug goodnight like girls
who are friends and blow
kisses that should
have been planted.

233. (G____________/Winter, 00)

Ice again and my coat lost its button,
but one compliment in passing and
I dream of you that night. Reef
shoulders (smooth) and skin as
white as Florida sand, I
stretch like beach waiting
for wave after wave, for anxious
tide to come in and out and
in again, for the spray of salt
that carries me out and under.