Poetry
my friend shut the light off
i went, ooh. dark
haha, he said.
haha, i said, in a matter-
of-fact manner. this matter-
of-factness of my slight giggle
at my gut reaction to the surprise onslaught
of the dark called to mind for my friend
something that happened earlier that
morning. in this story he was having sex
with his new lover. he made sure
to tell me lots of things before embarking on
the plot of the story, such as the total number
of times sex had been had between him and
his lover in the surrounding hours and
the time constraint hanging over them
like a big cartoon clock. this all became context
in his telling for the fact that it was taking him some
time, more time perhaps than he’d have liked,
to reach the culmination of this sex act, though
he reminded me how he and his lover
had only recently commenced to sleep together
so there was an element of not quite ease yet
there was a relevant element of performance
like how there often is in sex between two people
who don’t know each other well or are pretending
like they know the other better than they do and
in the interim are maybe leaning on performances
of sex acts past or performances of sex acts seen
within a movie, or sex acts seen, perhaps, most commonly
in porn, which lends a sort of meta layer to this performance,
a performance of something so self-consciously performance,
that has stripped away so many layers of storytelling and returned
to the bare bones of plot, character, setting, scene, drama, sudden
shifts in register, and one obscene emotion. so as this story
drags along, my friend is laughing nervously and maybe
the story is taking longer to tell due to these nerves, which
seems formally relevant to the subject at hand, and
remember, the lover’s dog needs walking and feeding,
but eventually we arrive at the climax of the story,
which is the climax of my friend, he’s saying, i’m gonna cum!
and his lover is saying, in the story, yes cum! and then
he cums and he announces, cum! like he’s presenting
the main course at dinner, which reminded him remember
of the way i named the sudden dark, and i understood why
he felt these two experiences compared, these namings
of a rapid explosion or withholding of something utterly
embodied, extra somatically, sensorily, schematically,
and we felt very proud of ourselves for journeying together
through this story and taking away all the salient points
and making incisive connections and narratological and
semiological projects of that nature.
in sum this was a very nice conversation i had with my good friend,
which started in the dark and ended as most good things do:
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzor is a poet and performer in Philadelphia, where she curates the reading series Spit Poetry. She is the author of the chapbooks Heehee (forthcoming Ursus Americanus Press, 2025) and DUH (Bullshit Lit, 2022), and her work appears in Joyland, The Offing, The Rumpus, Poetry Northwest, and the Cleveland Review of Books, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy on Instagram, but she can never be caught.