Sherry Chappelle

Where are you visiting from?

Where are you visiting from

in the afterlife? So many
possibilities: the Bardo, Jannah,
Purgatory, Svarfa, Valhalla.

No matter, behind closed eyes
I feel you here, as I’m splayed.
Displayed, ready to be slit and

sliced. In this pleasure palace
of the O.R, I flash my snatch
at the white coats and you-here.

There’s no position like this in
the principals of the Kama Sutra or
the once drawer-bound Joy of Sex.

And even with the stories of the martyrs
and the virgins, no details of other worldly
caresses, or heavenly hard-ons.

No one in this line-up cares about what’s
exposed, only the hip they’re here to fix.
No climax comes with a dose of Fentanyl.

So you must lift the veil between the living
and the dead, and bless my orchid one more time.
I won’t tell.

Sherry Chappelle struggles with love, death, metaphor and sound from a small corner of Lewes, Delaware. She has been a member of the Coastal Writers of the Rehoboth Beach Art League for two decades. She won the 2011 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize for her chapbook Salmagundi, and has a completed manuscript, Always Prey, that she hopes to publish.