Body Navigation

Paul Handley

My endowed nose directs the way I think you should go.

Tight eyes reveal that you have found what is hidden from me or overlooked while I thought of touching you without hoping that you reach to me, pushing against me,

your skin springs, the tautness of a not quite ripe pear that gives us ½ hour.

Finally my cupped hand touches what feels like a peeled avocado that has been sectioned.  Skin peeled when ready.  You push aside, your own timetable knowing it will come and ignore my directive twists, I never told you that wrist and collar had been broken.  They feel more sinewy from your noninvasive technique. 

I freeze out what I know for the moment has a rhythmic clicking like dominos falling that lead to and around frantic micro sensory hairs waving like a castaway frantically signaling a ship.  You brush the flags as if to say help is on the way and move to an 8 spot out of 10 on the needful scale after dropping a care package.

My cork travels up slightly as if pulled by a syringe and there is sweat upon my skull, eyebrows and pubes since your lips are touched with chili leaves.  I wait my turn or is that now?

Paul spent a career as a student and a student of odd jobs.  He was born in Oak Park, Illinois and then lived in Madison, Wisconsin for five years, Rhode Island for a year, and then lived in another suburb of Chicago until moving out of the house after graduating from college in Florida.  As an adult he has lived in Indianapolis, Idaho, San Jose, Denver and Providence.  Paul has had work published or forthcoming in Hobble Creek Review, iddie, Macabre Cadaver, the Maynard and The Smoking Poet.