Beth Gylys Who You Are You smell like smoke and wildness. Your hair is long, your eyes are dark, you crave the taste of meat. You know six ways to tie a knot. Your song is water slapping against a rock. You'll beat my ass at poker, smile as if you mean to hurt. You want it bad and often, you like a dare, the sound of money, the wet between your legs. And I am muscle, singe, a hike that never ends, mid-March, the sting of sleet, suburban-free, no mamma's boy, no fire without gasoline. Alive with heat, we'll make our own new engine, drive desire so hard we leave the earth behind, the dross so far below it doesn't feel like loss. Soul Sister Seeks Soul Sister I'm thirty, dark-skinned, proud and made of curves. An artist, I paint all day and waitress nights. I groove to Green, but rap jumps on my nerves. In search of someone to love for life. The right woman for me will like herself. She'll have a sense of who she is and who she wants to be. She must have known the blues, the wave of pain that's almost joy, the song that haunts my bones, blue-black and reaching for the moon. She also believes in God, and lives for more than just herself. I think I'd come apart without my faith. Let's fall in love in June warm nights and windows wide, our fisted hearts burst open like seeds, our spirits set to soar. To One Who Can't Leave From here to death may be a long road, so stay with your wife. Get home and be grateful. The closet is waiting, ready for your coat. Your children need you to teach them the ways not to love. Keep them safe with well-wrought lies. Each child must have a sickness to grieve. Let your loneliness be theirs. They will know, you've managed for them. It can be their slow guilt as they climb you like rungs to the world. Beth Gylys is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her book Bodies that Hum was published by Silverfish Review PRess in 1999, and she has had work published in the Southern Review, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals..