She Drank, She Did

From me, no less.
     My cup
Special as she was
     Shinier than the beach bum
         flotsam and former
         stripper pole flagellators
     who fling themselves against me.
Shinier even without
     her clout;
Without the man and diamonds
     draped along her chest.
She pressed
     into wet sand
Man pressed her harder
     And her outstretched hand
     dipped into my tide.
Brought brine to her lips.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he cautioned.
She laughed;
     flicked some in his face.
He tried not to wince,
     tried to part her legs.
“We can’t,” she cautioned, “we need a contrapasto.”
He felt in his pocket
     she laughed again.
He sank into her
     the way she sank into my shore,
         the man who said, “Jewelry’s a tough business,”
         when she said
     she was all about zymurgy.
She put her lips directly to the waves,
     sucked in like a child with chocolate milk.
That’s when he walked away.
Maybe he could have helped,
    but somewhere he remembered
         John the Baptist came neither eating or drinking and they said
         he had a demon;
         The Son of Man came both eating and drinking, and they said
            “Look, a wine bibber and a glutton.
            A friend of sinners.”


by Trevor

--

With custom words like contrapasto and zymurgy, you know this had to be one we did for Anna McCambridge. I think this may have been the first one, in fact.

We had some discussions on cheating strategies as a result of these poems; what to do if you had absolutely no idea what the definition of a word was. I think I decided that I would try and work a game of Scrabble into the poem somehow, but I don't think I ever got completely stumped. Unless you count "effluvium," where I was totally sure I knew it and was wrong but got it halfway right in context.

Great, now this commentary's not even making sense. Anna, you're downright contagious.