My Husband Wants to Have Sex by Lauren WB Vermette

and I explain that I am a padlock with two keyholes,

neither of which he can fit. Some doors should not

be opened, like the cage I keep behind my ribs,

where my leaping heart raises holy hell.

Yeah, that kind of door. Like the bridge to heaven

he built in our backyard. It eventually collapsed,

crushing the spirits hiding in the shag-carpet

of grass we call our lawn. Blades as tough

and coarse as the hair on my unshaved pussy.

Even I fear to tread. Let’s make like monks, I say

because the butterflies in my stomach all died

in their cocoons, leaving nothing but husks.

Yet another unfinished project. His garden-hose

shower, metal-bucket bathtub, the little ways

we learn to get by. I don’t ask for a bottle of aspirin,

but he knows. The nights we trussed me up in knots

of rope and were still bored. Our leaky basement

has more moisture, I tell him, smells better, too.

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Lauren WB Vermette is an ink-slinger from Dover, NH. Her work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Covid Spring, Edge, Global Poemic, Good Fat Zine, Hole in the Head Review, Lunation, and Rat’s Ass Review Journal. She has one poetry collection, And The Form Falls Away (Senile Monk Press, 2018).