Krista Cox

REBIRTH IN ROOM 406

When you are angular and dry, you forget
the feel of womanhood. Before you,

I reached blindly into the mouths of men to reclaim
the sense of roundness, of lust with a certain

delicacy, but I left them even sharper.
It was the stillness of the hotel air, the muffled

sound of the television through the wall, the knowledge
we would be heard. It was the way you dragged

your unlined fingers over the chin of your hip in red
lace, the tenderness in your opening

as I gently closed around you, the ceiling's reflection
of the relief in your eyes as years of buried

selves escaped through your forcefully praying
mouth. Inside your cries, we remembered ourselves.

Memory, like womanhood, is a loud, wet thing.

Krista Cox can be found in South Bend, Indiana, where she lives with two precious patience-testers (children) and works with three of them (lawyers). Her poetry has recently appeared in Words Dance, scissors & spackle, and Melancholy Hyperbole, among other places in print and online. Her OKCupid profile is a work of creative literary genius.