The Sculpture Garden

We had come to see the intersection of fixed objects with the changing fields around them. In the pictures, I'm a little pale and histamined, bleary in the face and winter is coming, but we got the second-to-last bus out before spring and it was the best thing we ever did today. On the bus back, the couples leaned their heads on each other in different ways, and C's shoulder was bony, but I put my hat there and leaned. Then I laid my head somewhere between his stomach and lap and drowzed for twenty minutes, holding his hand and pressing my head hard into his abdomen. If it had been me, I would have said, You're pressing on my bladder, but he didn't say that. I felt the flesh under there--all that skin and sinew of a different person who let me do these things to him now. After my nap I sat up and whispered fast, I'm going to bite your face, but I didn't. I think no one heard. I thought, I could write that down. Or I just thought, I have someone I could bite their face; then, I have someone whose face I could bite, all in that voice in my head that means I might write it down.

About the author:

Joanna Penn Cooper's poems and short prose pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals Boog City, Opium, elimae, Ping Pong, and SUPERMACHINE. Her chapbook, Mesmer, will be available from Dancing Girl Press in Spring 2010. She lives in New York City, where she is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Fordham University. Her blog is joannapenncooper.blogspot.com.