Tory Adkisson

Tory Adkisson holds an MFA from The Ohio State University where he previously edited The Journal. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, 32 Poems, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He currently lives in San Diego.

After The Fall

He plants kisses on my waist while my face
watches. The rest of my body
jockeys desperately for attention.
He's tried to grow something in the fallow field
between yesterday and tomorrow,
but nothing inside me has ever cried out to be nurtured.
He wants to see my nipples blink,
scratching them the way he does with dirty,
calloused fingers. I don't demur, though
my belly button purses itself, as if in disapproval.

I don't tell him when he asks, but I'm never
and always hungry. It will take him
a millennia to press me into the technicolor
landscape, and another millennia until
we're one in the same: me and it, him and me.
Until then, gulls continue to loiter on my cliffsides,
doing their damnedest to pull me
out of the scene by my tube sock. Soon
we'll wake up from the dream with mouths touching.
The sole survivors of some apocalypse.

The last two men on Earth.