Glass: A Journal of Poetry Volume Four Issue Two     

Marcus Jackson

Woman in Secret

My cousin eight and I five, he led me
to a gutted Econline, propped
by cyndars in a neighbor’s side drive. 
On bare floor near a wheel-well lay
a Hustler, peeled to its center pages.  
Crouched in the smell of brake fluid
and leaked rain, my cousin pointed
to the woman—nude and spread-legged
upon rumpled paper.  Dass Pussy,
he whispered, syllables rising steamlike
through the vast cabin.  Not the breasts
or the ample insides of the thighs,
but the sleek, transfixing pink, her own
fingers pinning the wings agape. 
I couldn’t yet have lost my first tooth,
couldn’t have contained lust’s dire rivers,
though I stared at that woman, a wire
in my mind having been pulled, the same
wire that trips when the ear is entered
by the warm, first words of a secret.