Ordinary Sex and Loving a Woman

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Written by Ellen Bass. For more Jewrotica poems by Ellen, check out God and the G-Spot.

Ellen is the author of The Human Line (Copper Canyon), Mules of Love (BOA) and Like A Beggar, to be published in early 2014 by Copper Canyon Press. Her poems have been published in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, The New Republic, and The Kenyon Review. She co-edited No More Masks!, the first major anthology of women’s poetry (Doubleday) and is co-author of The Courage to Heal and Free Your Mind (HarperCollins). She teaches in MFA program at Pacific University.

Ordinary Sex

Rated PG-13If no swan descends
in a blinding glare of plumage,
drumming the air with deafening wings,
if the earth doesn’t tremble
and rivers don’t tumble uphill,
if my mother’s crystal
vase doesn’t shatter
and no extinct species are sighted anew
and leaves of the city trees don’t applaud
as you zing me to the moon, starry tesserae
cascading down my shoulders,
if we stay right here
on our aging Simmons Beauty Rest,
dumped into the sag in the middle,
that’s okay.
You don’t need to strew rose petals
in my bath or set a band of votive candles
flickering around the rim.
You don’t need to invent a thrilling
new position, two dragonflies
mating on the wing. Honey,
you don’t even have to wash up after work.
A little sweat and sunscreen
won’t bother me.
Take off your boots, babe,
swing your thigh over mine. I like it
when you do the same old thing
in the same old way.
And then a few kisses, easy, loose,
like the ones we’ve been
kissing for a hundred years.

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