Barbara J. Orton's poems have recently appeared in The Yale Review and The New Young American Poets: An Anthology (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). Her Web chapbook, published by The Literary Review in conjunction with Web Del Sol, can be found here. She lives in Washington, DC.

Lyric When I look at you I look at loss; and I don't mind. What's past is a wild spill of misery, salt water and sharp sand. My body wants you as an apple wants the ground. Tell me there's no need this foolish, or this absolute, but it must color all the world in its perplexity, like a quilt thrown over sticks thrown broken on the ground. My body wants you as an apple wants the ground. Renunciation The mules chew sugar by the dry canal. My sister's eyes are nothing like the sun. This is my body, this is not my blood. My sister's eyes are nothing like the sun. She taught me madrigals and fingerspelling. The mules chew sugar by the dry canal. She taught me madrigals and fingerspelling, Latin insults, vulgar schoolyard rhymes. My sister's eyes are nothing like the sun which alters when it alteration finds. - I swear I'll cuff you, if you strike again. The mules chew sugar by the dry canal. Admit impediments. Love is not love. She taught me madrigals and fingerspelling. This is my body, this is not my blood which alters when it alteration finds. My sister's eyes are nothing like the sun. The mules chew sugar by the dry canal. Undoing Like you, if I could undo what happened between us, I would - but slowly, lingering on the details of my undoing: swallowing words like plum stones and then like plums, despair ripening to rage and tenderness to peak at the fresh heat of first meeting. Say I walk into your house swallowing salt, offering you my back, take off my coat, strip and scatter my clothes on the floor while you tell me about the man you love. I spit your coffee back into the cup. *     *     * After sleep I'll offer you my back, and this time you'll take it. I'll come staggering to the cuffs, breathing an æther of childhood fetish, bodily need and sheer, astonished, voluntary pain. Each stroke of the cane will erase a brilliant line, forcing the blood back under the skin. My head starts to clear. Before each blow I'll count backwards, swallow my thanks. *     *     * I know the bar where we'll end up meeting: the plastic couch in the back room where you'll bend me over your knee and beat me until I feel no pain. The last thing I'll notice, face against thigh, is that your leathers have the smell and feel of plastic, too - and not long after that I'll walk away, keeping my eye on you until you vanish from sight, and suddenly - wholly, and forever - I forget.