La Petite Mort by Quinn White

Cover your ears.

I took your father’s virginity.

On top, he should’ve faced me,
but he stared out his window
at the fence, its azalea footnotes.
He repeated, “Are you
okay?” until he came.

I died after you, when I was cute again.
Milk and honey curves, cashmere decked.
I lied, lined-eyes wide,
“I’m a virgin.”

My boyfriend’s sticky, pale roommate
could hear everything, and, good boy,
turned up football during our dead-end
hand jobs and 69s.

Home from Beethoven’s Fifth,
we unlocked the door to a nothing
that should’ve been David on the couch;
Police knocked, asked, and answered.
Bullet point,

their interstate-wreck-speed-parties-nose-in-the-grass
form, signed, cleared a room
in which, once they left, I held my breath
as my boyfriend licked me, patient,

a change. I stared at David’s thumbtacked Klimt,
the woman’s hand, a fist; She isn’t
down. She pushes, he pulls,
she disagrees. Wait,

I should’ve brought you home,
raised you in a pastel nursery.
I craved you. Hold up, relatives yelled,
“Adoption.” Can’t go back. Then, I came

and David’s face, your father’s cock,
my boyfriend’s tongue, sighed, asked,
“Did you get off?”

About the author:

Quinn White is the author of My Moustache (Dancing Girl Press, 2013) and Orienteering (Origami Poems Project, 2013). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from journals such as The Healing Muse, Sixth Finch, and Amethyst Arsenic. Quinn earned her MFA from Virginia Tech. She lives in Alabama with her husband and their three cats.