Falling Back by Lytton Bell The dark man's bed is already on fire by the time she runs to it it has, by all accounts, spontaneously combusted sweet sugar falls from his mouth It seeps like molasses It tastes red, smells of melons twinkles like spring-fresh rain in the fading light and it turns the tongue blue even bluer than that night she spent with Reginald Spencer back in Underbrook, PA all those years ago locked in the high school gymnasium, whistling He showed her how to climb the rope I lied. It doesn't turn the tongue blue Wishes in the dark twitch anxiously descending like a squadron of over-eager muff-divers who can't be hungry because they haven't eaten in days. In weeks. She's down with them She's falling back The cold gym floor of experience denies the abstract, and the mirror is waxing reflective shows her how she looked last Tuesday at twelve ten in her red dress Or that day in 1986, her black jeans folded neatly on a stack of navy blue wrestling mats Or next year, in her pine-solid ensemble of grass clippings and dirt Tomorrow comes as quickly as she looks away But she doesn't budge. She doesn't blink, unflinching Kid Power, now she was a climber I'll send her a postcard from the rope she ascended with long black hands Or were they blue? And when exactly was that day? Only love disdains to climb or crawl preferring to burn the bitten end of time spent in Jah'nat al-Ard A lit match reaches toward her full mouth around the glow of which the darkness waits and trembles, itching to advance Even the trees outside are smoking large bark cigars until at last, the dark man's unmade bed unzips a crack of flame from its deepest spring and licks a lengthening string of liquid sugar off of the tip of this October evening's retracted cerulean tongue ©2001 by Lytton Bell Lytton Bell graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1993. Her poetry has appeared in Outsider Ink, Poems-for-All and is scheduled for publication in Still, Poetry Now, Poetic Voices and Clean Sheets. Her latest chapbook, The Book of Chaps, will be available in early 2002.

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