I’m unsure what I(‘m) like
I’m unsure what I like.
I don’t know if I like making love slowly,
You know, the type where the skin is seen up close
As we kiss tenderly the exospheres of our each others’ bodies
Where it’s not about movements but moments
Maybe I like it fast
the onomatopoeia of banging
The crush and slap of body parts
The damp rush, moving too fast for thoughts
We don’t slow down enough to catch our feelings
To sweep our hands through the cobwebs of our thoughts
And then lick the glistening strands from our fingers
I’m unsure what I’m like
Am I the warm chaos of melted chocolate?
Someone standing in the shade of a big beautiful tree to polish the lingering shine off their thumb
A strange place for a stain
Or, am I a starchy pair of pants?
The kind you don’t wear
They lay folded in the deep recesses of closets, arrogantly waiting
To live
Yesterday, I sunk my fork into the moist body of a cake, unsure of whether I’d continue its journey to my mouth.
Goa, India
There are places where the land
Breathes.
Thick, humid exhalations that coat your skin
A moist heaving of the land
Since when is all ground solid?
Cows stroll like aging honeymooners down the dusty sternum of mother earth
Her hips rise swollen and curved on the horizon as she breathes her lotus -scented breath below
Rocking water into waves
Singing her luscious lullaby
Scooters put-put down the lanes of her ribcage like bloated mechanized mosquitoes
While women in saris the colors of the setting sun draw rusty brown rivulets of ink on the soft sides of their forearms.
They are the mother's white blood cells
Quietly doing her bidding
Listening for the purr of her breath
And holding their own when the papaya trees stand knockkneed
And water dries up like well-spent time.
Imprecision of Words
Words are so imprecise to me
They require rounding up or down
False equivalencies
Double negatives
Words are scrambled like tornado detritus in my brain
A landscape of still-swirling leaves and gently rolling tumbleweeds
They are doled out like government rations in a state of emergency
A truckload here, a few first aid kits there
Some people speak like the great plains
They recall their words, one by one, in the correct order
Freeways from Minnesota to Nebraska
No tollways, just
The ever clean and unencumbered flat
Words rolling smoothly like the mighty wheels underneath semis
A plainness assumed, a lack of dissembling
Distance + speed = time
All the elegant math equations pan out.
How are you?
Funnel cloud forms.
How have you been?
Tumbleweed
What do you think?
A house flies by in the wind
Ilse Griffin currently works in Wuhan, China as an English teacher at a university. She studied English and creative writing as an undergrad and has recently focused on TESOL/Linguistics as an ESL teacher.