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Lips
Bryan Dietrich

They began, of course, the first half of the horror
show’s theme song. Michael Rennie was ill the day
the earth stood still... Nearly as large as the screen
they inhabited, they seemed more tease than terror,

more O than E, more you than I. But when worlds
collide, said George Pal to his bride... You know
the rest, know all about rice and toast and time
warps, fishnets and fuck me pumps, lonely lights

over at the Frankenstein place. Me, I was still
a virgin, but everywhere I looked…lips. Yours,
your friend’s, your friend’s gay lover’s. Before I left
that night, I would taste them all. I’d walk out

of the theater, cross the line of a lone
picketing protester god-shod in Jesus
walkers, his passion jacked up on training
wheels, and enter another kind of darkness.

I would remember you, your lips, the cave
I never left, forever. How you whetted me for all
that followed. How the tongue, like wind, breezes
past each entrance, and how, after, the mouth freezes.

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