Emily Banks
Ceremonial
And when our grandkids ask we’ll tell them how
we rationed weed into bags for each week
to make it last through quarantine. We slip
on moss and slide into the creek, hanging on
for what stability is possible. Behind the stone
that forms a wall of privacy we find ourselves
surrounded by spiders, black with legs white-striped
like convicts hiding in the shade, as we are too.
One carries a pearl sack of eggs. Just what we need,
I say, more spiders, though who am I to talk
about succumbing to the urge of spring, even
when I think humanity has run its course. We climb
a hill just off the trail, find a soft patch
of decomposing pine needles. I catch a toad and talk
to it like a child, flattered when it refuses to leave my palm.
The young trees hold the beginnings of cones erect
like candles in a candelabra, ceremonial as sunset
approaches and the trail becomes our own.
My Neck, My Back
Because I never knew how to request
what I wanted from a man,
because I only knew how to text
something crude like let’s fuck,
after enough drinks to pretend
I didn’t mean it, because I was willing
to suck and smile and slur
my speech, say it was fun even when
my body still felt like an unwrapped
piece of hard candy left on the linoleum
floor of a supermarket to be crushed
by shopping cart wheels, because
I was embarrassed to have a body
that didn’t please easy enough, I requested
that song at every club. Khia
lounges in her yellow halter top and matching
head-wrap on a white-slatted
recliner floating in the pool like an aquatic throne
in the music video, a relaxed smile
spreading across her face as she tells the man
at her feet to lick it good. She barely glances
his way, but he gazes at her with rapt
attention, lingering on her every word
lest he forget a single element of the anatomy
she’s tasked him with. It’s brilliant, really,
like she wrote a blazon for herself.
Neck, back, pussy, crack, she places
her wants like a takeout order, never
softening her voice or moaning in imitation
of appreciation before the completion
of each demand. I never could
bring myself to push a man’s head
down where I wanted it, leaning back
comfortably and nodding along to my own song
with him hanging on, but when the DJ
finally agreed to play it in the dark damp heat,
the windowless anonymity of a club,
and my feet in flat sandals stuck and unstuck
themselves from the liquor-stained floor
and a man I’d never see again had found
my hips with his hands, I could sing it as loud
as I pleased, yell it into the pungent, grinding void,
and I could imagine myself reclining too,
godlike, slick-skinned, lip-glossed,
over a glistening pool.
Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Heavy Feather Review, Bear Review, The Cortland Review, Superstition Review, and other journals. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland and currently lives in Atlanta, where she is a doctoral candidate at Emory University.