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When I was a boy
I read in a book
that genitalia skin
darkens
over time.
I laughed.
It seemed
unlikely:
pricks and pussies
gone brown
in middle age.
Now I see
it's true.
All that friction,
all that heat.
Scorched earth
in a thirty-year war.

Ghosts

Ghosts of old orgasms haunt spots
where we spend them.
That perky girl's apartment
behind the Chinese
restaurant. Walk by twenty
years later and there one is,
pale eyes peeking
from the bedroom's dim
window. You're good
at this, it whispers. You're so
good. The green Ford
with its growly glass-packed
mufflers. That car shows up
in a faded photo and you see,
just faintly, something delicate
lying along the front seat --
panties, dangling from a slim
left ankle. The house
on Ramsey Road, the first
and only place you two
ever owned. Marriage fled
from there, but pause
across the street
in the shadow of a gnarled
juniper and you hear a quiet
voice calling from the family
room couch -- Come home,
come home. That dilapidated
employees' cabin at Cultus Lake.
Glance into the open door
as you back a boat trailer past
to take your sons water skiing
and a halo of white light
glows over her tiny bunk.
Old climaxes don't disappear.
They glide this world, this life.

Bio: David Chandler is one of those writers with a checkered past, including stints as gardener, grocery clerk, schoolteacher, basketball coach, newspaper reporter and movie critic. He has lived all over the United States, from Minnesota to Tennessee to California. He now resides and writes in Portland, OR.

His poetry has appeared in dozens of publications, including Chiron Review, Slipstream, Pitchfork, Coal City Review and Angelflesh.

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