Erotic Partial Burial by Jason Zuzga


Take a bulb planter and core down your reach.
Feel the soil crumble and its pressure, kiss partner’s lungs,
let your lungs be how your partner breathes
on a cold night. Try this by day. Keep
your arm locked in dirt for a long as you can as
dirt’s hug should feel spooned, close as pudding
and squirreled a pit in the peat and lie down, cry
for the dead’s dispersions in half-lives, the single group.
Scene of the grave enclosures, pressures in
crushings and lift mind to corn starch flecked
gravy clawed atoms misting root
mouths’ tornado and precipitate sprinkle, ash, fish
bones and lye, planet spinning itself like a proud kid
goat on shed. Now sun out click the nimble
thrust the robot raking of rattled float cranberries
wrapped barcode to store. Take a shovel down by down
power now and play half of yourself like hunger
wild wall, the skin that works on the inside trick,
tricked out and contained with throbbing
release, desire’s day mingling and these worms’
soft mouthed pokes. Your might and your face in the pond
there you might rub your clay foot in root gag and swallow,
gulp kiss going and going to making your liver a burrow
for press of dirt piss and quiver, sore the core lava
threadings of flash footholds and then the upmantling hands,
now a thumb, do brush the soil from these intricate weaves
of brow, he yourself be long strokes through pools, look
magnificent at his make-believe eyes blue brown and pupil
see that iris is lightning see may storms across grained eyes
fused fingers of opaque glass, prisms of lovers
burying arms, burying paired feet, two by two,
down into the tickle of the dark cool of undersand
sea moist and away from scrape burning sun

Jason Zuzga is the other/nonfiction editor of Fence. He has a chapbook “Atom’s Licks” available from Scharmel Iris Press and a book of poems upcoming from a Saturnalia Books in 2016.