Email Eros

You write
because it’s so easy.
Immediacy
becomes immediacy
becomes intimacy.
You speak
of lust, of how hungry
your eyes are
on her picture.
She responds in kind,
if slower,
her hand poised above
the keys
like a sword.
She says,
my hand on your leg,
higher.
You swoon—
it’s too easy,
the words
are lemon juice.
You tell her
her secret places are
like loam,
you want what any man
would want.
You tell her,
your thighs,
opening.
Soon, she
stops.
This was not
unanticipated.
People do.
They pull back, like a
horse shying.
You must stop.
At night,
in bed,
the nighttime words come
to you.
You cannot shut
them up.
You know they’re nighttime
words.
Yet,
you get up and
boot up.
The email box is emptied
of meaning.
There’s a blank space.
You must stop.
You stare
so hard at the space
that it stares back.
You pin the
first word there:
Catamite—

Corey Mesler has published prose and/or poetry in The American Drivel Review, Rattle, Dicey Brown, In Posse Review, Cranky, Re)verb, StorySouth, Canopic Jar, Juked, Pindeldyboz, Mitochondria, Mars Hill Review, and others. His novel-in-dialogue, Talk, was published by Livingston Press in 2002 and received raves from the likes of Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Stern, Debra Spark, Suzanne Kingsbury, Frederick Barthelme and John Grisham. His forthcoming novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, is also from Livingston Press. He’s been a book reviewer, fiction editor, university press sales rep, grant committee judge, father and son. With his wife he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at: www.burkesbooks.com