The invention of three board games & thirty-two sex postures.



There's no helping it


it's summer, it's vacation. & the grind of the heat sets in
upon our malleable skin, our blistering feet. The grass chokes
and succumbs. Especially the grass.

Step into the outside air: all pores prick & yawn wide
& the pinecones pop open their brittle bits,
a noise like a stone on glass.

Preserve us oh lady of Candy Land, oh great Yachtzee oracle,
there is nothing that this heat cannot make into a bore.


We sit & carp in front of petty fans. Idle hands
caper the last Parcheesi men into their nirvana,
brush away cribbage pegs from their moorings.
Shuffling Uno, attempting backgammon.

When it gets dark, you sweep the boardgames in a heap from the table.
Elbows out, cheeks wet, black seeds
in a row along the platter where the watermelon lies split open.


My stomach hurts later. I may as well have drunk
a gallon of water I'm groaning, kicking chessmen
out from under the kitchen table. Oh god.

I want to be a nun. There is no such thing as sex in this heat.
But you pull me upstairs and kiss that summer sugar from my face.
And we go through the trouble of inventing new methods of touch,
angles & inclines. Keeping each inch of skin far from every other inch.


Through the window come the whirring moths.
It is bearable, this way. Each limb sleeps miles from the other. We sleep,
ears pressed to the lowering, cooling sky.





July 2002 © Jesse B. Castaldi