Your gaze speaks
to my own deep ice
Not sentiment
more elemental
unsettling
Perhaps we met
in a sculptor’s studio
He shaped my shoulders, neck
labored on my breasts
You watched
enigma eyes inset
beard unchiseled
How long did we stare?
Were we modeled
for common patrons
but cast as amorous
gods, to please–
my arms, Aphrodite
Ares, your brow
Surely we rested
in velvet dirt, your chest
against my spine
hefting a mountain
upon us. These
alchemies hardened
deep secrets in our veins
yet stone’s justness
yields no clues
to our knowing
It’s old, cold,
stoically silent
mirrored in your
silence, my own set
mouth, the empty
arch of a doorway
Marianne Taylor is a bookseller at Powell’s on Burnside where she manages the sales floor in the Blue, Gold, and Green rooms. In a previous life she taught literature and creative writing at a Midwestern college, and her poetry has been published widely in national journals and anthologies. She once served as Poet Laureate of her former small town, but for the past three years she’s been trying to find her way around Portland.