For Marisol, Who Said No

      © Shota Voskanyan

She’d borrowed my sister’s perfume,

smelling like summer at Huntington Beach—

drugstore lotion and cigarettes,

seaweed and oil drums

burning, smoke sick with fast food wrappers,

Styrofoam cups, plastic lids—

her black hair spread

over the white sand,

eyes pretty rinds of Tequila-soaked

lime littering an empty face.

She curled cute

little brown toes when she laughed,

adjusted her tits.

Her tan-line hips said

sex and Don’t touch, at the same time.

When she turned over, on her belly to sun,

untiedher stringy

tangerine bikini top,

time stopped and wound back. My hands

becamedumb white explorers

for Pre-Columbian treasure,

searching for warm doors opening into

the mystery of Yes,

the magic of lips and tongues

spun around as the serpent eats its own tail,

hopingKinichAhau

could sacrifice us both

on a star-golden altar of teenage ecstasy.

-by Michael Dwayne Smith

Michael Dwayne Smith proudly owns and operates the world's most unusual name. His poems have been around the block a few times and his mother (God rest) kept a switchblade in her bra the one year she spent in high school. Those two facts are parallel in the small universe of this paragraph. He lives in the desert. He is publisher/editor of Mojave River Press & Review. He is a meat Popsicle.

Painting Courtesy: Shota Voskanyan

Shota Voskanyan was born in 1960 in Yerevan, Armenia.  He Studied at the Moscow University of Arts and he is a member of the Union of Artists of Armenia since 1995. He did his personal  and collective exhibitions all over the world.