--after a photograph by Ana Prundaru
That jet ski between your thighs vibrates exactly like power and happiness and every kind of sex you've ever imagined yourself to want. Pretty sure when you wake in 30 years and cannot feel a single nerve below your navel, have ridden across the skin of the water, splitting sunshine like a serrated edge divides lemons into eighths,each bright wedge of foam will fold back into each other wave and it will be clear you have left no mark. Turn back and see the sea: waves cleave to one another and leave nothing rent, and you sit stranded out there, your motor choked and you adrift in an ocean you called pleasure.
I'm up here along the photograph and its shore, calling to you. Dive off your custom watercraft and swim to the beach. No one of us standing here blames you for being seduced by the once constant tingle of skin we've followed all our lives. OK, a little blame, but you can be saved. Cut, this time, through the surface of sun with your arms, your own muscled strength, your heart black and white and black and white in your mind.
If you get here, we’ll roast a small catch of bland fish on hot coals and will squeeze citrus across flesh before we devour them with measured lust. If you fail, I will wade into the wake and we can drown there together, our old engines humming inside us while the sine of the tide draws us down under dusk, beneath light that flares in these lenses, these eyes.
