Now that she is not angry, she likes to think about
the pleasures she handed a younger man and how he took them
and rubbed them all over his thighs.
She likes to wonder at her sagging breasts
and how he rested his head between them
until she could feel her heart in his head.
There were so few words among the folds
of skin like secrets or compartments where she might hide
a lipstick that she never wore.
In the shower, as water pearls over her hard nipples,
she thinks about his teeth and the terror he must have felt
at taking the love of an old woman
and caressing it like the meat of a coconut,
peeling each layer as if it were laid out for him,
bit by bit, her flesh is not so delicate anymore.
Beatrice Hatfield is a poet living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. She has new and forthcoming poems in Carcinogenic Poetry and Valley Voices.
Angel Rust 