Sharon Olds
V3:E10 October, 2001

IT

Sometimes we fit together like the creamy
speckled three-section body of the banana, that
joke fruit, as sex was a joke when we were kids,
and sometimes it is like a jagged blue comb of glass across
         my skin,
and sometimes you have me bent over as thick paper can be
folded, on the rug in the center of the room
far from the soft bed, my knuckles pressed against the grit in the grain of the rug's
       braiding where they
laid the rags tight and sewed them together,
my ass in the air like a lily with a wound on it
and I feel you going down into me as
if my own tongue is your cock sticking
out of my mouth like a stamen, the making and
breaking of the world at the same moment,
and sometimes it is sweet as the children we had
thought were dead being brought to shore in the
narrow boats, boatload after boatload.
Always I am stunned to remember it,
as if I have been to Saturn or the bottom of a trench in the
         sea floor, I
sit on my bed the next day with my mouth open and think of it.

Location:	New York, New York
Occupation:	Teaches at NYU and helps run the NYU workshop at a state hospital for the severely physically challenged
Books:	Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, The Gold Cell, The Father, The Wellspring, and Blood, Tin, Straw
Awards:	New York State Poet Laureate from 1998-2000.

- August 2002 - hornet Body Parts for Art Naming Trees Divinity is for angels Hogs Loosed En Route to Slaughter The Masturbating Baboon at the Brookfield Zoo Marina Tsvetaeva First Time Crow and Raven Rembrandt while Saskia Watched Instead of the Usual - Stirring's Steamiest Six - The Word Witness It Wasn't Until Later It Not Love Amoroso