Whose House, Whose Playroom
- Whose House, Whose Playroom
Virginia Smith Rice, poetry
I have never found sex a sustainable solution to want. This lack- tragic has not contributed to my greater personal happiness. It is possible I am doing it wrong.
Some conversations make the room small. I do not want to be one of them, a hand rigid with punctuation, stabbing wildly and wide.
Your hands are an elegant problem I would like to solve over and over. A naked man in a large house squints at a thermostat and in this hunch, his body becomes unlovely.
He and I agree not to notice, so we look at our awareness together in silence. Afterwards, we don’t see one another anymore despite the proven sustainability of ignorance.
Want is also sustainable. And eats its own green-mothered appetite. A woman hunts here, thin-hidden. A father steps lightly along the spine of the roof. The children always hear. [End Page 472]
virginia smith rice is the author of When I Wake It Will Be Forever. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Meridian, Rattle, and Superstition Review, among others. She is co-editor of the poetry journal Kettle Blue Review and associate editor at Canopic Publishing.
