Like that by Kim Addonizio
Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night,
with no moon and no town anywhere
and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in the ditch.
Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty water
blurting from the faucet in the kitchen,
leaking down through the floorboards to hot cement.
Do it without asking,
without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery’s
shut down and the watchman’s slumped asleep before his small TV
showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways,
while the thieves slice through the fence with steel clippers.
Love me when you can’t find a decent restaurant open anywhere,
when you’re alone in a glaring diner
with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are greasy
and your hash browns underdone.
Snick the buttons off the front of my dress
and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just
beneath the surface,
their cold fins waving.
Love me on the hood of a truck no one’s driven
in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers;
and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat,
while turtles drag their bellies through slick mud,
through the footprints of coots and ducks.
Do it when no one’s looking, when the riots begin and the planes open up,
when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the pedal sinks to the floor,
while someone hurls a plate against the wall and picks up another...
Love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me
when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak,
when you don’t believe in anything...
Listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down
with me and close your eyes, the road curves here,
I’m cranking up the radio
and we’re going,
we won’t turn back as long as you love me,
as long as you keep on doing it
exactly like that. Art by Elizabeth Whiteman
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