Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

7 Ways of Making Love (after Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments)

1. Watching from the stands while the pitcher lines it up and the bat swings and sends the ball flying, to bursts of noise, straight out of Fenway Park, and everyone on the field pauses, just watching, wiping now the sweat from their brows, and you quench your thirst with your third cold beer and feel satisfied

2. Holding hands, fireworks going off, Fourth of July? No, they just do that here, as soon as it’s warm enough, and the fizz of each burst, pop, fizz, champagne bottle, gunpowder, fire department working overtime because there’s been no rain and there are people and animals who hate this but you always liked the show

3. At dinner, placing the food on the table, say when, when grating the cheese over it, knowing I never say so or when or stop, eyes larger than my stomach, hungry for not just the food, not just the cheese, not just whatever but for the hands who made it and brought it over, sustenance, and, now? Yes, now

4. Noticing the nail sticking out from the board of the deck, seeing its proximity to the blanket I’m laying on, the likelihood of me tripping on it (again), going to get the hammer from the toolbag from the truck, coming back, eyeballing, driving the thing back into wood flat with two swings

5. Witnessing sunrise, not quiet, but alive with every other animal up at dawn, waiting outside, up first, thinking about the miracle of it, whether God’s real or not, we are, seeing the clouds shift color and shape above the treeline, where the sun likes to reveal itself slowly, and then, door opening, mug hot, here, coffee’s ready

6. Driving ten hours without stopping alongside the Appalachians, pit stopping for fuel and that’s about it, joking as I come through the door about endurance racing and moonshine and family history and here is your Autocrat coffee syrup and here is the other thing you asked for and here we both are, space closed

7. Two in the morning, rolling over onto (into?) each other, air conditioner, no quips this time, tactile vision, knowing, knowing this, knowing where borders are or were and blur, safety in the dark, making up for months of absence, and the moon works her way to fullness, not there yet, but soon

Jillian Boger is a writer, teacher, and editor from Massachusetts who lives and works in Rhode Island. Some of her poems have been published in The Worcester Review, Boog City, and in Bridgewater State University’s Graduate Review.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx