Prickly Flowers

who needs a love philter:        anodyne:        when you’re young:
it was beer that we drank tilting the dark bottles for a quick pull.    

some bitter foam.        the long line of our necks.        I was a moonfish: 
always swimming away.        but this time waiting.        stupid

with our beauty.        sometimes I pretend you’re dead now.         premature
elegiac.        I make a joke of our sex which was grand.        screwing

ourselves pink and wet.        puddled.        breathy.        when I woke
up late we were both surprised.        you were still in the front room

eating eggs.        the whole house scantily clad.        except for the tiny explicit
bedroom.        the enormous bed.        heart like a moonstone.         

what engine can fling that heavy missile away:        hissing
into the water.        a decade on the bottom to leach out loss.






Susan Grimm's poems have been published in Poetry East, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, and Blackbird. In 1996 she received an Ohio Arts Council fellowship in poetry, and her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection of her poems. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize, and in 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize. Also, in 2011, her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published by Finishing Line Press. In 2012, she started blogging at The White Space Inside the Poem.