For a Woman Who Hates the Word Moist
By Sarah J. Sloat



Because mosquitos skim puddles
preening for a feast,

because her father gave all the girls
names that start with M
the way a rancher brands his calves,

because the drunk on the corner prefaces
his catcall with mmm hmmm, as if
tracing twin welts rubbing up

against each other, she cannot stop
the word’s emergence.

Lips saddled with a moan, the nasal dirge
can’t help but burst into a cloying center,
diphthong buckling the tongue

into the shape the mouth makes
when the chocolate chosen with caution
from the box abruptly oozes from its cavity,

and she wads it in a tissue at the nursing
home of her great-aunt whose one eye

waters, who calls humid weather close
when actually it’s fetid. Torrid. Horrid.

There are other words that crawl her skin –
there’s tongs, there’s cleave,
but when she stands to get off at her stop

on the subway home, her thighs stick,
unpeeling from the bench’s vinyl sheath,
a release prickly and sibilant,

and she knows no gooseflesh
this warm, this damp.

© 2010 prickofthespindle.com