A Brief History of My Sex Life by Subhaga Crystal Bacon (Poetry ’95)

In Memoriam of Past Rain

Once I spent a frigid weekend
in a dank, unheated room

in Atlantic City’s Hotel Byron
back before casinos pushed

out the indigent veterans
of many wars. (Memorial Day,

parades of the old in uniform,
their peaked hats over solemn faces,

walking or wheeled, the last
surviving soldier from this war

or that, flags of cloud, bullets
of drizzle.) In the mildewed room,

a woman I taught to find her clitoris
and orgasm. That war she fought

within herself. What country she claimed.
Old, old now, this remembering.

A lost name. A slim, almost childlike body
locked against the knock of pleasure.

The beckoning street, the salty, rain-
drenched night slick with broken light.