Shaving a girl’s head, and other eroticisms

There is one bird singing at midnight. Two pairs of lovers’ eyes
observe in infinite refractions of heat. Framed against the thought
of a city and a river somewhere south, there is a long black wire
trailing, purple clipper guard singing as I glide the razor
over a girl’s planetary skull, soft snow of falling hair
in the middle of summer.

Music is playing from five feet away, but it’s quiet here,
the only sounds the lazy purr of the razor and her breath
that sends hair rippling, planets scattering and colliding;
her head becomes the moon. My lovers watch
as I lay her nape bare.

Against the city frozen in night, and warm in wanting,
the sounds I hear after brushing up her hair and she
retreats to sleep are these: the slow calligraphy
of feet on the floor as the three of us take turns
dancing in the living room, the dark exhale
of an arm pressed to a throat, held, beat change,
release, but not relief from wanting. I hear hunger
in skin pressing together, lips unfolding like flowers
into kiss, the thunder of a finger under a chin,
pressing up ever so slightly. The lightest hiss of a spin,
the negative space of a dip: I hear all of these, and want.

In the bedroom, with its red carpet, the three of us
continue a dance. In that absence of the girl with
the lunar head, freshly shorn, we become celestial bodies
of our own, incendiary. Too many mouths reaching for mine.
Two sets of hands burning me into bloom, one pair so large
they eclipse my throat like the sun, the other soft and smaller
and trailing my back like the last light of day. We are divinely
aligned, in perfect orbit of fingers weaving through hair
and across hipbones, her teeth on my thighs creating a new
galaxy of exclusively miniature Neptunes. I forget how we
finally let gravity invade our bones, but when we collapse
into each other with the exhaustion of stars colliding, I know
what space smells like: the heat of an electric razor, sweat
like holy water on my inner thighs, ozone—shattered and blue.

By Laura Mayron

Biography:

Laura Mayron is a graduate of Wellesley College and was born and raised in Maui, Hawaii. A queer poet, she is pursuing a PhD in queer, surrealist Spanish literature at Boston University. While at Wellesley College, worked for three years as the poetry editor for The Wellesley Review. She has won Honorable Mention in Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award and Wellesley College’s Florence Annette Wing Prize for Poetry. Laura has been previously published in Vagabond City, Gravel, Glass Kite Anthology, and Whiskey Island, and ArLiJo (Arlington Literary Journal). If she could go back in time, she’d have a drink with Spanish surrealists.