DC Poets: Teri Ellen Cross Davis

Ode to Now ‘n’ Laters

Tucked under her pillowcase

heaven is a roller-filled roll away.

The night cut by the sound

of unwrapping candy -silence

before each saturated fold

is peeled away, revealing

apple, banana, pineapple, or sweet, tart cherry.

Always now, now, now, never later

as the moon winks in slick approval

from an otherwise cold adult sky. But here

yields glory exploding on her tongue,

juice filling her mouth

so much so, she smacks her lips,

breaking the night’s polite rules.

In this dank cave she calls a mouth,

every taste bud is hollering hallelujah,

called to witness how the essence of a thing

only softens when stretched and sucked so hard

the mouth’s roof pays in tender.

And in the mouth’s wet joy, all parties

become malleable, teased apart with teeth,

cajoled to reunion by a happy tongue.

Candy shares its secrets now, how

much sugar, corn syrup, artificial flavors

and dyes, until she arrives at its heart,

its ephemeral moment, when a thing is

the most it will ever be and no more.

This is the pulse of the god of pleasure -

seduction and destruction in one last

brutally beautiful swallow. And all the mouth is

wondering is when will it happen again?

So who can blame her? Once awakened

all she does is eat another (now)

and another (now) until she falls back asleep

and satisfaction is the enamel’s slow erosion.

From Haint Copyright 2016 by Teri Ellen Cross Davis. Printed by permission of Gival Press.


 Teri Ellen Cross Davis has attended Cave Canem, the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work can be read in Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, and the journals Gargoyle, Natural Bridge, North American Review, and Poet Lore. Her first collection, Haint, is published by Gival Press. For more about Teri, visit http://www.poetsandparents.com