Zucchini Queen: Three Poems by Eva Monhaut

Les Sexuelles

Our first night together
we spent below each other’s waists
with the glow from the bathroom
sprinkling shadows across our bodies,
fragments of light exposing the rose gold of
my breasts against the stone grey of the sheets
and you moving—breathing
with your lips between the geometry of my legs

and afterwards the silence of the lethargic humidity
separated only be the whirling of the ceiling fan and hyphenated breath.

A Thursday in September

It is another Thursday evening in September;
head heavy, body vividly a body, cracked,
sunken bathtub, water gurgling, neck mis-
shapen, and you perched on the water-ledge,
the bubbly horizon line between you and I;

you are toying with with the concept of
displacement, dipping your hand into the scalding, reaching for mine, pulling it heavenward to your halogen, halo lips–
I grow weightless, helium-headed while
the strawberry infused green tea grows
lonesome on its toilet throne and the neighbors tv softly murmurs the latest news:
     somebody shot somebody somewhere for
     some reason today, they probably wanted
     to hate so immensely they had to try it
     with a gun
but me,
I want to love so intensely,
I take you
in me
and we descend
below.

The Zucchini Queen 

There once was a zucchini queen
who laughed herself into a slumber
every night. She never missed a night then
she woke every morning at 6:45, sharp.
She boiled lifesaver mints in a cast iron skillet,
drank it like it was salve
and she carried on this ritual
until she didn’t
and that was sometime in 
March when she met a race car driver
in disguise. He wore Mt.Dew embossed bell bottom jeans, 
ate sizzling bacon straight from her mint-stained cast iron 
and he grew a beard so long that all the animals in the kingdom
scurried into its oiled tangles; they died there.
It all began to rot;
he smelled of mildew
but she loved him.
She loved him so much
that she sawed off her arm with the edge of a pickle jar
and swept out that boney massacre
while she bled
little zucchini blossoms
across the wide and wild wind.