Gail Goepfert

I want to be inside your darkest everything

because I
want what’s holy and what’s unholy without asking absolution, want
to wake in night’s thin vellum to moth-wings incandescent in the lamplight, to
be lust-flushed in the abandon of whisker and wet, to be unveiled, to be
willing, hungering, breath gulped and swallowed inside
the darkness of swollen lung and quivering belly and mortality and your
redemption, mine, like unmapped constellations in the darkest
heavens because I'm riveted to your darkest everything.

 —"I want to be inside your darkest everything.” Frida Kahlo, diary

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Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet and photographer. She has three book publications--A Mind on Pain (2015), Tapping Roots (2018), and Get Up, Said the World (2020). Recent publications include One Art, The Night Heron Barks, and The Inflectionist Review. She has a collaborative chapbook, This Hard Business of Living, and a book, Self-Portrait with Thorns, being released in 2021.