My Wife and I Role-Play the New Poem of the Honeymoon

Tonight, Love, let us be
anything other than what
we have been—you,
in a blue tuxedo
with a beard drawn on
your chin in eyebrow pen,
and me, in your two-piece
teal string bikini, our hotel room
overlooking the public pool,
our curtains gutted wide open
down the middle like the belly
of the bluegill we love
to bait fish for together
and feast on together
with dainty forks. Let us
not think about choking
on bones tonight. Love,
let the world’s many earthquakes
and Amber Alerts and subway delays
not exist. Let everyone in Knoxville
be having the strangest sex
of their lives, the stranger the better,
my Love. For this strangeness,
let us even imagine new names.
I’ll call you Mr. Stevens
if you call me Jacqueline
because the both of us are
visiting this Tennessee River city
from different hemispheres,
both of us married
to other skinny wealthy someones
in other elaborate ranch mansions
beside other salt-water pools
with gaudy fountains spitting
from the snake faces of magnificent
alabaster Medusas because nothing can be
hotter than fucking someone else
while being someone else
who owns a fuck ton of land
in a distant kingdom.
Tell me I have small tits,
tell me you have the biggest dick,
tell me how we are
the famous authors of the new
graphic novel of illicit love
together, page after page
of new and surprising
penetrations. My love,
in this Hilton hotel room
with the minibar pillaged,
here, upon this disheveled bed
both foreign and as large
as a private island,
because you are saying
in this marriage
that we can be strangers,
I am saying
from now until the surgeons
elegantly blue-glove
my princess lungs
from my ballerina chest
I will always call you
My Majesty My King
before eating the fake hair
out of your royal armpits.

Ephraim Scott Sommers singer-songwriter, poet, and essayist, Ephraim Scott Sommers is the author of Someone You Love Is Still Alive (forthcoming 2019), winner of the 2019 Jacar Press Book Award, and The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (Tebot Bach 2017), winner of the 2016 Patricia Bibby First Book Award. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. For music, poems, and essays, please visit: www.ephraimscottsommers.com.