Making Love After Watching Interview with the Vampire

Brad Pitt will live forever, and somehow that comforts me
as you remove my pants, my underwear, leaving my socks
half on, my shirt on the bedpost, yours thrown over the TV.
           
Tonight I want you to sink teeth into collar bone and taste blood
in the back of your throat, which you must keep there till morning
when your 100 dollar toothbrush will pulsate it away.

Leave marks everywhere you go: my nipples, the crook
of my neck, my open ass, and I promise to leave a trail down
your chest, between your thighs, and around your groin.

Tomorrow I will be forced to buy new sheets, to stare at shelves
of pristine linens, laughing as the sales clerk rings up the darkest
sheets I can find for another night of playing vampires.

But really I just want to live forever, want Tom Cruise to trick us
into eternity, to sleep in a coffin with your head at my feet,
your toes in my mouth, letting history wash over us like bathwater.

I want to make love to you always, and never again, to take
your life in my mouth with every intention of sucking you dry,
leaving you lifeless and empty, because life is the real death

and that’s why Brad Pitt looks so sad for all 122 minutes,
his eyes glazed and soft, his skin whiter than white like the skin
of your ass or my hands, or like your teeth before they bite.





Arguing Over Reality After You Claim to Have Seen Brad Pitt Getting in a Taxi

He was too tall, not enough muscle,
his hair spiked in all the wrong places,
but still you insist it was him,

that the camera alters our perceptions.
Nothing is ever as it seems. And I’m
reminded of the woman by the Ohio River,

that Spring we first fell in love.
How she told us there are fish
in there as big as cars, all puffed up

on garbage, shit, and pollution, makes
them the size of those Volkswagen Bugs
all them college kids keep driving,

and we believed her. Believed in fish
we could ride inside, river fish
with enormous bellies thick with slime,

their eyes glazed to the size of tires.
But now we are far from Ohio and your
eyes have grown weaker, shielded by thick

glass. And I’m sure you are mistaken,
sure that Brad Pitt is off filming a movie
in a country where children die of hunger,

their bellies swollen empty, or maybe
he’s working on his six pack. Either way
you assume I’m jealous and rub it in

by claiming he winked at you, but I remind
you of perceptions, insist he had something
in his eye from sleep or maybe a camera flash.

You shake your head and we go silent down
the sidewalk, until you gently bump my
shoulder—a sign of giving in, of coaxing me

back to you. Maybe it wasn’t him and I counter
with maybe it was and we smile believing
we have each won the battle, yet knowing

by tomorrow we will both tell someone
how we saw Brad Pitt, how he winked  at us,
turned, and got into a taxi as big as a fish.





Questioning Our Future After Watching Fight Club

Brad Pitt looks so sexy with his abs covered in man blood,
his lip busted, his head shaved close. You prefer Edward
Norton with his shirt-sleeves and ties, his neat apartment,
his ability to cry with cancer patients. We both can agree

on how hard the fight scenes make us, how our pants tighten
against our flesh at the contact of men on men, the sweat
dripping down  backs: yours, mine, theirs. But tonight
it’s about more than sex, more than your skin on my skin,

your taste in my mouth. It’s about my fear of destruction,
the possibility of sinking into another’s flesh and never
returning. Or how we might suffocate the other, hand over
mouth, living in a nightmare where we are the same person,

the same body moving around the apartment, talking
to ourselves, blueprinting our lives onto the other, until
we wake with a gun in our mouth, our hand on the trigger.
Your fears are more rational, fear only that I’ll leave you,

unable to control the urges in my gut that make me want Brad
Pitt to beat my face in, and fuck me afterward, his abs glistening
with blood. But tonight we are still here on the couch we bought
from a catalog, your hand is still in my hand, and I still want

to prove myself to you. Want to strip off my shirt and make you
touch my skin where all the bruises are, some still purple, others
that wonderful shade of green that means they’re healing.





Trying to Sleep After Watching Thelma and Louise

I touch your body to make sure you are still breathing,
that you haven’t given up on us and stopped there
in your sleep, your face turned against the wall where
I can’t make out the slow movements of your nostrils
or your lips as the air moves in and out. I can’t sleep

tonight, can only wonder what it would take to get you
to shoot someone for me. Anyone really, the boy
who called us fag at the gym last week, or that student
in the class I’m teaching that shows up late every single
day, or maybe someone more dangerous to society,

like a man bound to get inside me, where I won’t even
let you go. I imagine us on the run, blood splattered
against your glasses, my eyelids, our lips the perfect
shade of pink. The dust beneath our wheels spinning like
the Wild Wild West I read about as a little boy in Indiana,

with crushes on the cowboys in books I kept under my bed.
I see us on that lonely highway my fiery red hair doing
summersaults on my head, yours short and dark. Or maybe
we remembered to pack silk scarves to disguise our faces,
so we might better blend into the landscape—just two gals

having fun. In our version Brad Pitt is just as sexy and young
but wants to fuck us both, hard, one after the other, until he
collapses in exhaustion and we rob him. Taking his tight blue
jeans and white cowboy hat, which you insist I wear, sneaking
out the door leaving his perfect bare ass fast asleep in some bug

motel far from Florida, where you sleep tonight by my side.
But no matter how much I try I can’t reinvent the ending.
It’s always the same: you and I in that Thunderbird, tears on
our cheeks, wobbly voices, and courage that only comes
from killing someone. We kiss that one last kiss, soft and sweet,

just enough to give the gay boys chills, and then I put my foot
to the gas and over the cliff we go, into nothing but white. No
explosion, no death, just us hanging in the air for all eternity,
          wondering why we didn’t see this coming.

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