By Sarah Wetzel

The first time I made love with someone

twenty-three, I was twenty-two

The last time, I was more than double that

                                                                                    Am I wrong

to say I transformed?

I was old enough to be his mother and yes

I had all that power

                                       I was ferocious

I wanted revenge

though for what, I couldn’t say—gray

or the grief of gray?

                                                but I didn’t blame him

and I brought no serpents

My mood wasn’t born from the blood

of someone I’d gelded, though, to be fair, that man

let’s call him a boy

                                    I ate him up

At what age did you feel

most beautiful? a lover once asked, wanting

me to say right now

                                                But it was then

with that boy

                        who tasted like a waiter, long worked

a supplicant, he worshipped me

and I, worshipped

needed the sweat, the salt sweet of both

of us, the blood seeping

                                                from my seasoned lips

and didn’t I swill it? A day later

I stood in a door four thousand miles

from where I’d left him, victorious

                                                               I’d raised my dead—

fury, vengeance, hunger—

                                                those sisters of Aphrodite

~~~~~

Sarah Wetzel is the author of the poetry collections The Davids Inside David, most recently released from Terrapin Books, River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. When not shuttling between her two geographic loves—Rome, Italy and New York City—she is Publisher and Editor at Saturnalia Books and a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature in the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. can see some more of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com.