Crying After Sex

by Anita Ofokansi

even though this is exactly what you wanted:
to sleep in a strange bed tonight, a drunken screw;
your organs rearranged like furniture and someone
to churn your insides around as if making butter.

Is he a naughty child in your kitchen of lust,
two fingers in the honey pot, stirring? Maybe it’s the way
he moves inside you like he knows where he’s going, or
at least how, in the blind dark, you become braille

for the right pair of hands – a book spread wide
open at its center, a malleable spine. God knows how
he’ll survive the gush of you, spilling and spilling from
the basin of your hips like warm bathwater.

Any other night, you would turn away as you
came, your face crumpling into shapes of vulnerability
behind your hands, body quaking around him. But this
time, you hold his gaze. You sob his name

and then crack open, over easy like an egg, your
heart dripping yolk onto his bared chest. When the
tremble passes, you try to scoop the pulpy mess back
in-between your lungs, panicking, but it’s

too late. He sees your sorry heart, sitting there in
a pool of its own fragile blood cells, could probably pick
it out of a lineup now. He hears the pulse of it. A begging
so ferocious you could almost mistake it for bravery.

Leave a Reply



%d bloggers like this: