Her tongue mimicked the color of her bikini after she'd licked the cherry snow cone, & the tip of the paper cup dripped fluorescent beads of syrup, cool pinpricks, onto her oiled belly, the electric swirl pooling her pierced navel where the gold ring flashed. I told her its glittering would attract sharks, how a novice scuba diver skimming the reef off the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica—I smiled at her— had been taken headfirst into the maw of a six-foot mako & blamed the attack on the cluster of studs rimming one ear. He'd managed to tear free & flail wildly to shore. Here I stroked her plaited hair. The scars raking his skull seemed tribal, hewn in some Land-That-Time-Forgot coming-of-age ritual, but the raw stubs of his lobes oozed a milky gel that caked his cheeks. As she jerked her braised shoulders in a tableau of revulsion, undone straps whisking sand, the icy flavor overflowed her belly button, ruby rill snaking toward her tan-line, then under the rim of triangular cloth. She gazed at me now, propped on both elbows, the snow cone like a splintery bulb generated by body heat, its slow leak shape-shifting her pubis into a relief map of a savvy Third World country that exports slashed fins for soup but saves, for the occasional tourist blundering through the market square in search of a cheap souvenir, the sun-bleached, primeval hoops of teeth. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...DINNER IN A QUICK LUNCH ROOM by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET THE WAR THAT ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK by JAMES GALVIN TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON THE GARDEN OF ADONIS by EMMA LAZARUS |