Desire
Abe Louise Young
We laze in the bathhouse
where people are naked and idle
and three or four times a day
everyone gets hungry
We grow moist,
swell with steam,
our microbes flourish
our magazines wilt
I tell my sister
I don’t mind having
a very fat woman for a lover
I tell her
it’s so amniotic,
lying on a fat woman
is like floating
on these soft perpetual truths
But they’re not healthy! my sister exclaims,
something must be wrong
with their self-esteem--
You’re going to die, too,
I say
We laze in the bathhouse
where people are naked and idle
and three or four times a day
everyone gets hungry
We grow moist,
swell with steam,
our microbes flourish
our magazines wilt
I tell my sister
I don’t mind having
a very fat woman for a lover
I tell her
it’s so amniotic,
lying on a fat woman
is like floating
on these soft perpetual truths
But they’re not healthy! my sister exclaims,
something must be wrong
with their self-esteem--
You’re going to die, too,
I say
About the artist
Abe Louise Young is an award-winning poet and educator whose work explores creative contact and liberation. She lives in Austin, Texas, and was educated at Smith College, Northwestern University, and the University of Texas, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow in Writing. Her poetry/essays have recently appeared in The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Massachusetts Review. Her books include Queer Youth Advice for Educators: How to Respect and Protect Your LGBT Students (2011), a chapbook of poetry, Ammonite (2010), and Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and Vision from American Teenagers (2005).
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.