Dear, rose, fill this blue Christmas with violets. Love is stagnant in this winter storm. Frigid air clings to my bones. My teeth chatter like an audience in a crowded auditorium waiting for the show to begin. Show me love. Tease me, caress me, please me. Spread my legs and let spring bloom before the ice sets. Aren't you cold? Yes, numb to your touch, but inside I'm burning up. Come inside me—I'm burning up.
© 2022 Nortina Simmons
I knew he was gone when I awoke shivering. Silly me for thinking this time would be different, that a random man you bring home from the bar would have the decency to stay at least until sunrise.
The hardwood floor feels like ice on the bottoms of my feet. I need carpets, but with what money? I’m too cheap to turn the heat on before the first deep freeze. Bedroom slippers will have to do for another month. At least the alcohol lingering in my system keeps me warm from the waist up. What need do I have for a man?
Continue reading “Kindling the Fire”
He was only supposed to help me move my bed.
Move it.
We didn’t get that far. The bed frame parts are scattered across the floor, the box spring is propped up against the hallway wall outside the bedroom. The mattress—where I lie on my back, knees drawn to the ceiling—blocks the front door.
I squeeze the back of my thighs to still my legs from shaking, but it’s no use. I can feel his tongue down there, and the memory of it sends me over the edge. Philip’s tongue has the strength of an ox, the prehensility of that of a giraffe. His mouth reaches places Levon can’t even dream of, and Levon loves to boast about how big he is, how far he extends when he’s hard.
I hear the shower turn on down the hall. He must want me to join him. What other need would he have to wash? We haven’t gotten dirty . . . not yet . . . and we kind of have this thing with showers.
Continue reading “What You Do to Me…”
He texted me that he had a treat. Silly of me to think that it was anything that would give me pleasure.
I’m too old to be on the floor—joints still popping when I return to my house hours later. And was it so hard just to do it in the bed? I’d disappear under the covers, lay my face in his lap. But then, he likes to tower over me, watch me be submissive.
Dick.
Continue reading “Bad Decisions”
It’s just five in the morning—the sun’s made no plans to rise—but Sharon’s shift at the 24-hour McDonald’s two blocks away ended early, and all evidence of my presence has to disappear before she gets back… including me.
I shouldn’t have come. I’m not the one to console him while he cries about his unlovable wife. And I should have told him enough after his third shot. Better yet, I was supposed to be gone before his homeboy arrived with the weed. Instead we three hotboxed in his car parked on the street, and I got so high I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me. Or his lips when he kissed my neck once back inside the apartment. When he slipped his cool fingers under my shirt, looped his belt around my ankles.
“This isn’t right,” he said, but pressed inside me anyway, and I cried into his oversize shirt while still grappling for his hips, needing to feel him closer, telling myself again and again, This is wrong. You’ll never get over him if you keep fucking him…
Continue reading “When He Calls”
I am the product of too much eggnog and bourbon balls consumed before 10pm, conceived between the flimsy, paint-chipped walls of a men’s bathroom during the office Christmas party. Under the mistletoe, the father I never knew breathed into Mama’s mouth that he had to take a piss, and she, drunken by his words, followed, not even waiting a few minutes between their trips to avoid curious glances and scandalous whispers from their co-workers.
Continue reading “Hump-bug”
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