Songs for Shagging

If I’d written poetry when I was young
it would’ve been full of fucking
in carparks or fugitive dunes,
to Behind the Lines by Genesis,
or the gentle gossip of river reeds—
his fingers and tongue
waging an assault
until I was bias-cut,
ebbing and flowing around him
like silk.

There’d be student rooms
with narrow beds,
my nose pressed into his clavicle
as he pleated me into us
after sharing bitter coffee,
Bowie told me
I could be a Young American,
and every goddam climax
made me
cry.

Next, a sense of something
beneath the surface,
deeper now, gathering darts,
Pulp asking—
Do you remember the first time?
We glistened in front of gas fires
or cooled between crumpled sheets,
mithered about whose turn it was
to come first—
or make the tea.

But I started writing after kids
and climbing the mountain
of menopause,
so my verses, like my body,
are full of dropped stitches
and pork belly scratchings.
Still, I’ve just discovered Minaj’s
Super Freaky Girl,
and on Friday
my husband is in for a treat.

Bio:

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Comstock Review, Modern Haiku, Avalon Literary Review, Black Bough Poetry and Flashflood. She is the author of Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and has a forthcoming poetry collection, In the Belly of the Wail, with Querencia Press. She has published three novellas-in-flash— Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press).

I can be found on X @AdLibby1, Instagram @ad_libby, and BlueSky @adlibby.bsky.social.