Encounter

I picked her up at a bar
on Southside; lipstick lez
with hair the color of cardboard
and cinnabar stilettos
that matched her scent but
didn't suit her Tanqueray stride.

She stripped while I watched,
the detached observer-
her breasts were not like

melons

only half globes of flesh and fat
and failing musculature;
nipples that were not the pert red

of Bing cherries

but puckered and flat across
their tops, angled slightly towards
the blue cut-pile of a motel 6 floor-

They look like Devils Tower
and the thought was as sudden
as a spilled shot; close encounters
of the desperate kind and the laughter
was as quick as the process

She was angry, the observer unrepentant;
what we made was not love
but raw, real in the way of imperfections,
everything and nothing at once.

After, I read her poetry she didn't understand
while she drank gin from a plastic glass
and watched the words fall
like minutes, like years.