S&M

tanner x

 

What I don’t understand is your view of violence.

How two lives could be bound without pain.

When the sun cracks open the night

like a beaten eggshell, what other name

could you give? Was it forgotten, somehow?

The length of love like cord between

the winter elk and starving wolf?

 

Would Christ have loved

so deeply without the cross?

Gandhi, his hunger? Dr. King

this broken husk of an empire?

 

What is love but pain filtered through the eyes

of God? So when I touch you, and you pull

away                     closer

it’s as if a sea has been parted, the first

foot set down. As if

we were the people being freed, pulled

through a sleeve of suffering

towards release, tight and dangerous

as the water on both sides, threatening

to break

 

***

Tanner X is a student currently enrolled in Georgia College and State University, working towards an English major. He has had work published in Penultimate Peanut, SHARE, Evocations Review, Unlimited Literature, Porch Critters and The Peacocks Feet, as well as receiving the Academy of American Poets’ Student Poetry Prize for my poem “The Wind Gatherer.”