“Bicycle Poem” by Noelle Kocot

There were cathedrals falling out of your eyes
And your arms were the handlebars
I held in an abbreviated dream of crushed petals
Strewn across the limpid avenues.

I said, “I have poems for you”
But my words were lost in the wind.
I said, “I love you”
And you drifted into sleep.

And so I said nothing and rode you in and out of the rooms
Where we had stretched the boundaries of the soul
Like an endless sheet
And I felt you waking up between my legs.

*

Noelle Kocot is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Phantom Pains of Madness (2016), Soul in Space (2013), The Bigger World (2011), and a book of translations of some of the poems of Tristan Corbière, Poet by Default (2011), all from Wave Books. Her poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry in 2001, 2012, and 2013. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry, the American Poetry Review.

© LIT Magazine Issue #1, 1999