Nancy Mitchell

Chocolate on my new pajamas

Spun from a hundred cocoons
of mulberry leaf-fed silkworms
light as fog scrim skimming
my skin thin as a rose petal,
luminous as the full moon,
translucent as the champagne
flutes we raised and raised
to our bouquet of married
decades, to Auld Lange Syne
and in your slurred but perfect
French raised the last of it
to la fin de la civilité, y la fin
de la vérité y a fin de la liberté!
You vive mon bébé’d me
and I vive mon bébé’d you
back and we slippery kissed
until we fell like Rome—Fiddle-
Faddle sticky and Godiva
smudged fingers, the blazing
banked logs toppling like Doric
columns in the fireplace.

Author: Nancy Mitchell

Nancy Mitchell is a 2012 Pushcart Prize winner and the author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut and the The Out-of- Body Shop. She teaches at Salisbury University in Maryland and serves as Associate Editor of Special Features for Plume. She is the Poet Laureate of the City of Salisbury, Maryland.

Plume: Issue #100 December 2019