Ken Rumble
Communion
I crept through your neighbor's yard, careful
not to trip the security lights your father
installed. Balanced on a nail below your window,
I tapped the screen until you slid it up
and I slipped in like a burglar. We didn't speak.
We pushed off our clothes, lost in learning
the circular motion of falling and rising hips.
I read your body in the dark with my fingers,
tongue, thighs, and palms. The rug burned my knees,
your back. We bit our lips, careful
not to make a sound, our moans
quiet, shallow panting.
For months, we watched lights from cars on the road
sweep back and forth across the ceiling
like searchlights peering through the night.
Several hours later, intoxicated
on the smell of sex, mothballs, and Chanel, I crept out
like a thief, walked home under streetlight
after streetlight after streetlight
after streetlight and in school
I nodded to you in the hall, walked the other direction,
thinking of the bottle of your father's vodka
I took that first night. I didn't understand
you were teaching me a language:
grammar, punctuation, tense, person,
possession, agreement, case, infinitive,
subject, predicate, and plural.
Ken Rumble teaches part time at Salem College in North Carolina, while also building boutique guitar amps. Having just received his MFA degree from Penn State in Poetry, he realized quickly that his long term goal should be to found an underground civilization of hyper-intelligent cats. In part, this new found obsession is a result of receiving a BA in Creative Writing from Beloit College and working on the staff of the Beloit Fiction Journal while there. His poems have appeared in 5AM and Patagonian Winds; several more will appear in a forthcoming issue of Pennsylvania English.
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