Spooky Boyfriend #5

I know it won’t work, none of this, we’re both foodies and we both have insatiable taste

Let me take this little thing out of context—
Let me turn your body into food,
not like the portabella beef you ate
when we first met,
but a steak clothed in a ruby-spiced dress.

Let me make you the horse of many colors
in my mouth,
turn from torture to tepid:
red pepper in a washing machine,
dead fire in a blueberry pie,
raw rump roast on an elementary school desk.

Let me tell you: it’s not that I pray
for indigestion, but there are things a woman should admit
to herself: hot coffee is hot,
too much orange juice stings the tongue.

After all, this is only about intentional pain,
who can pinch who harder, who can purge more.



Teresa Petro-Micchelli's most recent publication is with Anderbo. Her chapbook, Tattered Ride, was published in 2009 by Asleep on the 4 Train Press of Pittsburgh, PA. She is poetry editor for shady side review. Teresa is a candidate for Chatham University's MFA creative writing program where she is an assistant editor for The Fourth River.

Spooky Tidbit: Teresa works in a university guest house that was once an old abandoned frame of a house. When the university purchased the property in 2000 the skeleton of a woman from East Liberty was found underneath a mattress. She had been missing since the 1980's. One night after Teresa had finished vacuuming the conference room, she left the vacuum cleaner by the elevator and sat at the desk. A few minutes later she heard a scratching sound and looked up to see the vacuum cleaner move across the hardwood floor. She thinks she was either half asleep or visited.