Appetite

“You won’t always have this appetite.” Jane McKie

Wooing her is like licking
an electric fence, all wet hunger and idiot shock.
You won’t always want this trouble.
You won’t always have this appetite.
You won’t always write DMs and then
delete, and then refresh. You won’t always insist
on getting your chin wet. This story stretches
only as far as browsing the cost of a flight.
Ask lightning, an easier trip, a gentler blast
than a nude at midnight.
Girls are taught to make
hunger –
I am built for sating, packet-mix, preheated,
impatient. I am buttered peaches,
I am the wide field of expectation, I am the calm cow
who asks how the new fence tastes, and I am proof
that you might always have that appetite.

alice tarbuck