Pleasure By Lisa Folkmire

Pleasure

Like an exercise.

               Like an improper delivery.
The nights in your bed and the insistence
                                 seeping from my own throat of more

breakage, more

                 pushing,
                 more

                                  pulsing, until
the pain
turns
to white.

Marrow or bone
white.
                 Breath shaking

                 pain. Like the taffy
                 pink and pulling
back on itself
in the window.
                                              It has an existence
and its existence is this: to turn
and thin but
               never break until
devoured

                                              --there is something to be said
about the way a pair
               of thigh muscles
               can hurt in equal
               amounts in that
                                                             soft
humming pain.
               The taffy pulled
               over and over
                               in shop windows.

I always wanted to take its
pink sweetness.

I’d watch and wait for its skin--

              always thinning, never tearing.

              16, sweat, crotch on the narrow
                              piece of hard bike-seat. For 23 miles,
                              I’d push myself, pulsing past cars and

trucks and vans and busses. Girl on wheels

              flying through the city streets

                                             for her own good. The biggest

                                                            damn secret yet.

              And my halfway stop,
              my sweet release, letting us both

              fall to our sides and feeling
              the green grasses tickling my neck.

              Coolness, to lay there, arms spread,
              back in the dirt, breath catching.

              It’s something they don’t
              teach young girls, the pleasure

                                                           of getting off.

                                                           All by yourself.

                           Like a threat. Our ears covered
                                          during adult conversations about
                           female pleasure. The pleasure talk
                                          in front of our eyes, like the taffy
                           behind the glass, turning itself in
                                          the window.

Even in the almost pain,
even in the almost rubbing.
Upper thighs against upper thighs.

               Young girls don’t joke
                             about masturbating on their parents’ couches.

Young girls only joke about masturbating
                                            with a dick. We must all be self-masochists.

                              Certain butterflies and birds change
                                             colors based on their surroundings

                                                           not like chameleons
                                                           but more like ideas.

               You see the purple, you see the blue.

               (Pleasure
               is a word that sticks
               in my mouth.)

​

Lisa Folkmire is a poet from Warren, Michigan. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts where she studied poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Heron Tree Literary Arts Journal, Gravel, Atlas & Alice, Timber, and Ann Arbor Current Magazine. She is also a reader for The Masters Review.

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