Pedal

I have a friend who measures desire

by stillness, who is most turned on

by the person in the room who meditates

without flinching. The librarian, too,

in the Manuscripts Division, handling

the patron who can’t seem to stay seated

warns: I will serve you the smallest items first

as a knit sweater slides off a chair’s back 

into a loose knot. All day we could have

watched clusters of blue bottle gentians

flexing their umbrellas open and shut

as bumblebees submerged head-first

into one bloom after another,

dizzy subspaces, partially open

paper dressing rooms, trying on things

till they’d wrapped themselves

in a good dusting of pollen. Everywhere

intimate containers seem to be in motion.

The raised bed full of squash flowers.

The black latex glove masking

the bare hand ladling bowls

of wedding soup for the lunch crowd.

My quick pedal revved by the world.

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“This poem was set in motion by a playful text exchange with a friend about a phrase she’d come across: ‘intimate containers.’ Afterward, I kept riffing—thinking about containers, bodies as containers, and the range of stimuli that spark erotic sensations. In Come as You Are, sex educator Emily Nagoski upends the notion of having or not having a sex drive. Instead, she offers that we each have a much more sensitive, nuanced, and contextual set of machinery responsible for sparking and halting our desires—what she describes as accelerators and brakes. I think of ‘Pedal’ as a little inventory of containers and/or erotic accelerators.”
—Jenny Johnson