My lover has a fish on his wall
This is a poet’s bedroom––
a place where paper thrives on black light.
It breeds oddities––the Wahoo fish, mouth open
like a drunk teenager, fin wobbled to one side.
Do not feel sexy here,
even with arms stretched tip to tip,
you have no span.
Do not speak,
do not reach for any language at all.
When he sleeps, the room sleeps too.
Narcissistic personality disorder
If I chose to fuck a woman I would start with her back,
she tells us after our fifth round of tequila and dirty limes.
It’s important to begin with the largest, flattest surface of things.
She says her father taught her that and looks reminiscent for a moment
as if she’s remembering some long ago afternoon in a wood shop,
her father carving a porridge bowl and Daddy looks down,
pats her head, then hands her the rip saw. Mikey nods,
but I know her father left when she was born
and he was an accountant anyway. Jason orders another,
probably because he’s heard this inventory before
or maybe because he’s just not as mesmerized as Mikey
and me, having loved many women with long hair.
She puts the hair, with its strange, gold flakes across her shoulder
when she gets to the part about the lips and how she’ll part
them with her fingers and whisper dead poets’ words
about moonlight and how the woman will moan back at her
with a low voice that shivers like a dancing bird.
Jason laughs at the part about stomachs pressed together,
although who knows what’s funny about that. Mikey tells him
to shut it, as if we’re watching the good part in the movie,
the part when the hero is just about to change into his other self.
Maybe we are experiencing some metamorphosis,
although it’s surely in a place we barely feel.
Mikey excuses himself to the bathroom before she gets to anything
to do with wetness or darkness. And it’s just as well, because she’s got
my two fingers curled in her hand and she taps them on the table.
And she stops. And she talks only to me.
Katy Richey’s work has appeared in Rattle, Fjords Review, Little Patuxent Review, The Offing and other journals. Her manuscript Into the Bluest Part received an honorable mention for the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2015 Fine Arts Work Center Walker Scholarship for Writers of Color and a 2014 Maryland State Arts Council individual artist award. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow and host of the Sunday Kind of Love reading series open mic at Busboys and Poets in Washington D.C., sponsored by Split This Rock Poetry Festival.