Bruce E. Whitacre | The Foldout Couch

 

Jesalah Love Art Neon Sign
After Keith Haring

The Foldout Couch

 

His force thumps the entire divan

against the renter-white wall,

adding to the small dents.

These are the good years.

Galaxies revolve like the club door, powered

by magnetism and mystery.

Tossing cushions is foreplay,

though sometimes here the fizz goes flat.

A bicep in the red lava light,

an ass in the veil of blue smoke, its globes

green glitter-strewn and sweating. Heaving

planets and stars call

to the white light between the eyes,

the fire in the throat

as you take all he’s got.

The collapse, the caress, the clip

of the spring through the mattress.

Another notch in the floor.

Counting down the security deposit.

 

Previously published in RFD, Issue 190, Summer 2022, pp 55-57, with other poems from Whitacre’s forthcoming Good Housekeeping.

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s recent publications include his debut poetry collection, The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks (Crown Rock Media, 2022); Sky Island Journal; Poetry X Hunger; Dear Booze; Diane Lockward’s third volume on craft, The Strategic Poet; and the 2022 anthology I Want to Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. Work here was nominated for Sundress Publications’ 2020 Best of the Net Anthology and the 2024 Pushcart Prize. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. Bruce is a native of Nebraska and lives in Forest Hills, Queens, with his husband.