Ray Rasmussen

Trying It On

"I feel so comfortable with you," she says, her hand lightly brushing my chest.

Comfortable? I try wearing the word. It's like my bathrobe that long ago should have been rag-bagged. Soft and warm...yet so full of holes. Or like the overstuffed chair that Dad fell asleep in while watching golf on TV.

"Comfortable," I say. "Instead how about 'When I'm with you I feel like a baby bird about to make her first leap into space?' Okay, you're not a young chick. Then how about, 'I feel like a matador dancing with a flame-snorting bull?' Or better yet, 'I love the tension I feel when you take off your biker boots revealing the cobra tattoo etched on your big toe nail?'"

dusk
passing the tattoo parlor
three times

Her hand is stroking that place just below my beltline, that uncomfortable zone where my stomach bulges more than I want it to, where her dinner rests so comfortably.
  

fall drizzle
a motorcycle catalogue
in the mail

First published in Frogpond, 33:1 (2010)