poetry

Treehouse Poem

soundtrack for this poem

Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in sunny states like California and Texas and his beating heart of leather and gold, so big he had to be a lover with dimples and a dog. He liked berries heavy and ripe on the vine in the spring, bursting juice in his mouth. He liked to remember the shape of faces, hands, with his pen. He liked to feel the edges of his body thrown up against something solid.

Meanwhile, there was a poet who lived in northern states of Alaska and New York and their pine treehouse of aching fists. They were bursting open with gift and overspilling with a fountain of voice. They liked bergamot and the boy’s skin and tall mountains and sandwiches and smooth flat beach stones and getting fucked by the planet.

Their gravity together is undeniable. They make fingerpaintings of their inner visions on each other’s insoles, on each other’s tongues. They try on their places, their callings, in the haven of hotel room walls. Their pulses become synched.

On days in the north like this where the birds are flocking and the sky is clear, on days where the boy’s car is clean and ready for the yellow dotted line and return, there is little more than a single pane of glass between them. An arbitrary distance of separation, because the moonbeam pulled like taffy stretched between their chests keeps them imperceptibly drawn to the other’s orbital motion. The string between them keeps them ready to snap like rubber bands, ready to pounce like predators, ready to take their leather and gold hearts and suspend them on a chain to hang from the ceiling of their treehouse. They pull the ladder up and take it apart to use the rope, but put it back together anytime they needed kale or whiskey or tacos. Their bed is scraps of paper and scattered recordings of bliss and scars.

Happily ever after is many, many moments, strung together in lines of text and pressed leaves and sketches, and worn like a crown.

Published by Sinclair Sexsmith

Sinclair Sexsmith (they/them) is "the best-known butch erotica writer whose kinky, groundbreaking stories have turned on countless queers" (AfterEllen), who "is in all the books, wins all the awards, speaks at all the panels and readings, knows all the stuff, and writes for all the places" (Autostraddle). ​Their short story collection, Sweet & Rough: Queer Kink Erotica, was a 2016 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and they are the current editor of the Best Lesbian Erotica series. They identify as a white non-binary butch dominant, a survivor, and an introvert, and they live outside Seattle as an uninvited settler on traditional, ancestral, & unceded Snoqualmie land.

3 thoughts on “Treehouse Poem”

  1. Jacks says:

    Beauty.

    This is a book I would love to read.

  2. Claire says:

    Warm honey feeling in my soul :)

  3. jeezu says:

    This is beautiful! I love your voice in this. Do you write a lot of prose poems? if not, I think maybe you should.

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