Christopher Kempf

PORN

We sat rapt on my roommate’s futon, the four of us with nothing
better to do in those days than drop our jaws and gawk.

He was huge, the size I imagined a man could be
only after several operations and gallons of those creams I’d seen online, cock
like the kind on dinosaurs, like Florida hanging from the mainland.

We listened in silence to the cries of his small blonde, body
pent between his legs like a stuck butterfly while they fucked. Somewhere
there was music, the soundtrack half elevator half rave
but right, it seemed, for a scene

like this—clean skin glistening in spray-on sweat, her slick,
unblemished breasts, her yes like a no. No,

not one of us spoke. We were thinking, I am sure, that surely
it’d be like this, our own thin dicks like fingers
filling with blood as we wondered what it would be like the first time—

Theresa Gilloon’s futon while her roommate was gone, or,
in more wistful visions, some impossible name like Kayla
Kleevage or Veronica Sin, the peninsulas of our dicks swinging from side to side

as we avoided the cameras and moved cool as movie stars.
We lasted for hours, the girl bent in every angle of pleasure

we remembered—the Eiffel tower, the trapeze—her please
filling the tiny dormitory of our minds while music played
from a radio somewhere though there was none. It was nothing,

you already know, so consummate when we did it. We finished
in seconds. We left. Later we’d admit everything
a poem won’t show—how it goes

sticky and limp, how life wears tattoos and you
sag and are sweaty and come back again and again to watch someone
insist it is pretty.

—from Rattle #31, Summer 2009