Poetry: Bottoms-up Girl

On a bar stool, sits a contortionist,
raises her left leg, her shoes and eyes,
are brandished before my face.

In this drunk circus, I am a clown-lion
while eyes around us, applaud her poise.

Her leg dances down, and then she arches
her back in a practiced invitation.

In my dark beer, bubbles rise into a mist
of expectation, but I am a reluctant sensualist.
She is a bottoms-up girl and I drink in slow sips.

We rehearse our act of evolving artifice,
she shows the ductility of her right hips and knees,
I fudge lines of the drunk poets of the East.

Now her body is the rhythm of chatter about us,
now the orgasm of the brewed thoughts unites us,
and then she faints, as her boyfriend surprises her.

I recognize the man, my childhood friend, who insists,
in his fiancée he sees a wife — envy of traditionalists.

I toast to him; avow, 'she's not in my arch-type'.
As they leave, she winks. I stammer a good-bye.

I repeat, as I grapple with my phantasmal crisis:
'She is a bottoms-up girl, and I drink in slow sips.'

Previously published in Nefarious Bellarina
(Reposted here on request by the editor.)