— After William, William, and William; Robert, Richard, Sam, and Tom
In the absence of left hands and left breasts
and right eyes and toes and teeth—
like gathering more data, adding salt,
pulling all the green out of earth
and plopping it in a bucket.
Then what? Do feet learn how to swim?
Guts and more guts? Brains like raw fish?
Even when it’s lemons it’s not real yellow,
so swallow for me. The harvest is closer
than ever and the juice in our bladders
and the asphodels on fire and women
on the moon, and the storm in my mouth
and the passion, so cold and so delicious.
Like roaming the countryside without you
and eating morning with my wife and our
boyish hope and artificial bread and butter
as subtext for ordinary desire to keep
our hands in each other and our mouths
on hilltops where our love calls us
to the things of this world. Where we
move from past to present—
her nature in mine and mine in hers.
It depends on our tongues in the river
and the river in the river.
EROTIC CONTEST FINALIST, 2024
Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Best American Poetry, Palette Poetry, The Colorado Review, Fourteen Hills, Los Angeles Review, as well as other journals and anthologies. She teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.