Quarantine Sonnets

By Karina Bush

Sonnet I

Chest fur helix deep—sought as in blindness

My bed when I get the sickness in mind

Psychosomatic—shriveled feminine

He makes me useless as an imbecile

Visions—suck on his sweat—it turns into

Wine in my mouth—transubstantiation

My core absorbs his rhythm—I go like

The worn Theresas agape in sculpture

Begging from the blackness of the old pit

Where sweat could pool if we could show restraint

A fountain to wash in and drink plenty

Lie like plastic beauties from the future

If we didn’t wail and scare them away

Or prefer to be wound up almost high

Sonnet II

Oh pregnant negative, I’m in trouble

He’s wrong inside, his real face hides, like me

A blank storm of psychical inertia

Awakens—I know the pattern of this

Sickos who plant nirvana but they can’t

Water it with more than a drunken sob

We know the bend love is capable of

Yet we won’t sleep for this, slump in chambers

Full of monoxide eroticism

Far from love or even lust: neurosis

Tricky to escape, we are unwilling

Navigators of the intricacies

Of pain—and there is my fear eye to eye

That he lacks the stamina this requires

Sonnet III

Knew it was fucked, my gut is a screamer

Still took off my clothes, walked into the cult

Focused and bloated with fantasy drifts

Aiming high—the peak-headed forever

All-aloft, accessing my medicine

Saliva, jealousy, roses, roses

Exploding roses that I’m sure he sees

Quest for him to explicitly say it

To ask me to lick him, utter the words

It’s a control-measure of the leader

To not do, and I am always willing

Ever-willing, sacralized, a glutton

In-waiting, looking up his skirt so shy

I’m a cum-powered pet with one program

Sonnet IV

In the depths of night, what does his dick dream?

Does it have its own little brain flashing?

Capable of memories and visions

And working through issues like unfinished

Business—attempts to solve the emptiness

And sense that it was made for more than this

Is it like a woman’s heart in the night?

So desperate and so cinematic

Weeping quietly onto the bedsheets

Thinking of me and sending messages

Up to the brain, causing a double dream

And making the morning more confusing

For a man in his forties long past prime

Still prime leaks into and from him nightly