Dennis Mahagin

ORIGINAL

Something a little off
about the guy, but I do love him, she
says, the way he goes way out on a limb,
where women
are dying
to talk to him, on the spot
in the cleft of a canopy
where apricot leaves turn
burnt orange in early
November, where sunshine
sometimes hurts worse
than longing, initials carved in bark
and his thumb, gone
deep, says she,
within the mouth
of one who's getting off
already they topple
and fall, like husks of apricot
into the loam of a garden plot,
amid the whip crack
and slash of tall
branches felled
in the instant, all around
the rifle shots and medieval
lances... something about this guy,
she repeats, and sighs
with longing for what
she's already got,
down there
in the dirt, sopping cleft
of blue jeans wrapped up in Adam's
spindled atria, his thin busted limbs
to grapple and gasp, always
holding hurt
in his garden
of torn skin, spurt of fecund apple,
and she's all set, she says, to climb
with him; to fucking sin
and fall again.

Dennis Mahagin is a writer from Washington state.