Desire #37

She stirred her latte at the condiment counter
like a panther eroticizing the horizon.
Architectural schools sprang from the cut of her hips &
that dress fit her like a razor:
bayonet shoes, sapphire toe ring
& buttery gold all over.
I dropped The Bacchae & lunged for the raw sugar
by her wrist, leaned in to speak, but
the glint from her ear deflected my best line.
She knew she was the axis of the planet
headed for town, said

“Nice satchel”

& left with all the oxygen in the room.
Saturday night, 10 p.m.--
I returned to the ancient drama on my lap,
wanting to sculpt a church out of the Ko‘olaus,
spar with the rain,
betroth myself to Pleiades.
Or chase her down to Waikiki
with exotic liquor & dripping lilies.

Clint Frakes was selected by Mark Strand as one of the Best New Poets of 2008 for an anthology of the same title through Meridian Press. In 2006 he received the James Vaughan and the Peggy Ferris awards for Poetry. He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the Northern Arizona University writing program, and received his Ph.D. with emphasis in creative writing from the University of Hawaii in 2006. He has appeared in over fifty journals in North America, England, Australia and Argentina since 1987 with recent work appearing in Bamboo Ridge, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cause and Effect and Language and Culture. He is the former chief editor of Hawaii Review and Big Rain, currently working as a free lance writer and editor in northern Arizona.

Email: Clint Frakes

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