If I recall correctly, he was pounding at your door for weeks
before you gave in (even with his power,
rape was always the last option),
before the last tempting deal—your virginity
for anything you wanted.
I think he liked the idea of being the last
(and like all men, they only want you once).
And you were lucky, you know—
other girls don’t get a choice; better beer and steaks
for the rest of my life than photosynthesis,
turnips in the byre or a permanent diet of beetles.
Later, in confused moments before falling asleep
under a pallid moon, I thought I heard
the echoes of his laughter
at your request to trade in the periods
and crimson-edged cries of childbirth
for the clamour of metal on flesh
and this other kind of sharp blood-stink.

your body.

It got boring after a while,
watching you make the same arrival every day
with a sun speared through your
infallible arrows (the same kind
you tried to capture my heart with
like a bad valentine pun)
and dripping light as red as wine on the floor.
Worse still, making me tend like children
those blazing red eyes, those incandescent hearts,
those burning apples you (with your own light
shooting from your face like knife-blades
and the same look I remember
when you introduced me in my designer clothes
at parties) flourished in your old impresario act.
Stupid man, still trying to get my attention ten years after
our first date when you told me that eating fire
was the kind of thing you liked doing.
This is even better — hoarding each flame like herbs
with a little convenient adulation thrown in,
more trophies for your anti-global warming policies
mounted on the wall like me.

Now you say you’ve bribed your scientists
into letting you live forever.
You really think I’ll let you?
I’m sick of languid embroidery,
boiling rice like little congealed boredoms
and cleaning your light spills. Your pill shines
like the last voting slip on the table,
tasting not of the concentrated warmth
of your sunshine but a capsule of moonlight
spreading ice through my body. I freeze and lighten,
I am floating into sleep and rising into
the amnesiac whiteness of the moon. Soon I
(a lonely shadow against a pale-dusted porthole)
will look down at you and hear
the loud music of your parties, smell
the Chanel of your new wife and see
the sunlight flooding out our house completely.