poem to be read without anyone else in the room
in the shower my libido growls like a thick-throated bear my muscles under this heat
rattle & unrope pearlescent soap suds drape my genitals in jewels
like a toxic algae bloom my pubic hair folds into the wet of an anonymous lake
in this case your sweat which i don’t name for fear you’ll know it’s yours
tomorrow’s genderless god won’t punish us for this but they will eat us whole limb
from succulent limb i don’t even like sex or have it all that much but
sex poems are the most fun to write when i keep you where the mouth makes
an O in ejaculation or in grief nothing’s hotter than a paradox
a möbius strip down of morals & prom dresses riddled with mothballs like bullets
in a closet door in my greatest fantasy i throw our voices to the sky to be melted
into milky pink plumes my throat seized by fingernail beds blue as a vein
waiting to be cut as all the beautiful things at the bottom of the ocean
there are too many beautiful things at the bottom of the ocean
if you hollow it out how many beautiful things will you kill we should
wash ourselves in them we should go there is only so much time to drown
Gabrielle Grace Hogan is a poet from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Spiral Orb, LEVELER, The Penn Review, and others. In 2017, she won Bradley University's chapter of the Academy of American Poets' University & College Prize for her poem "pools." She is currently pursuing her bachelor's in Creative Writing, with plans to pursue an MFA upon graduation. Her website is gabriellegracehogan.tumblr.com, where you can find links to all of her social media and also poems.