Picnic

When we first come together everything is fruit and sucking.
You prepare sandwiches. Fry the bacon from its fat. Slice thin slivers
of tomatoes from the Rubens' rounds. Lay everything between bread
in varying pressed layers. We walk, talking silently, fingers entwined
in a mist of perfume commingling between our leavened bodies.
It is a green furnace even for May. You lay out the blanket.

When you enter me we spill the grapes from the quilt into the forest litter.
The sky swims in our eyes. The sycamore lean over us like a congress of pitched
stoic doctors like those in Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. I perceive
the ocean turning in you. You hold it inside and work its forces slowly into my surface.
Ants climb aboard the grapes; vibrate, drunk on the juices of decaying fruit.
Sweat forms along your thorax and finds its way, stinging sweetly, to my lips.

Later, at home, we find a nymph tick nursing from a pocket in your pale skin.

Erin Wilson has contributed poems to San Pedro River Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, New Madrid, MockingHeart Review, and Mobius, The Journal of Social Change, among others. She lives in a small town in northern Ontario.