☀ Today's Poem: "Sex Talk" Lesley Wheeler

"After a fight, men want to have sex, but I don't," my mother said.
She glanced at undergraduate me from the driver's seat as if a membrane

had been breached and asked, "Do you?"

I wanted to change the subject.
We were returning from the mall through the stony suburb

where the model lived, the one who said, "Nothing comes between me
and my Calvins," where the fire department floods the common

every winter for skating, creating warty ice ungroomed by Zambonis,
grass snagged in its skin like ingrown hairs. My mother kept looking

at me, her eye a sideways question mark, tricky liquid liner painted
along the lid, pupil unrelenting.

Everyone in the family except

my mother owned their own lockable room. She had to read her Harlequins
out in the open like a gazelle. We stalked through, asking and asking:

"Where is the," "Why can't I," "Help me." Nightly, her shirtless husband
arrived with a pump-jar of Jergens, demanding she moisturize his back,

scaly from chlorine, but I knew—spy crouching on the stairs,
fingertips brushing wallpaper embossed with creamy trees,

its surface all bubbles and seams—what he was after.

Once, at a modernism conference, a guy chased me around the canapés

while lecturing me on Marianne Moore's asexuality.
I knew my mother didn't like sex, but I never asked

was it generally or just sex with my father. Nothing
gets between me and my shame.

I don't know what Moore wanted,

just that she wrote cryptic poems under her mother's surveillance.

Heterosexual marriage: she, too, disliked it. She was nearly sixty

when her mother died.

Now, I know death's intimacy.

How honesty frightens me. My mother is everywhere:
cells lodged in my body, invisible flakes of skin on sweaters,

a baggie of ashes on the bookshelf.

Not after a fight.
Until adrenaline burns off, I'm hot the wrong way. Clenched.

I hope she knew what an orgasm feels like. (During my first,
a rainbow tree grew between me and my eyelids, privately.)

She said to us, over her book, "No, I don't want
to hug you goodnight."