Poetry: Two Poems by Asa Drake
This pair of poems by Asa Drake offer a harmony unique to themselves—one magnifying the other, and both about love, both filled out with Drake’s assured confidence in the strange.
The Wasp
Doesn’t shelter herself in work. Who is she waiting for like a lover?
She hasn’t even birthed him yet.
I’m not easily distracted. I’ll birth them
before I love them.
Give Up Something Nice
Where is the Lord? Where is the Lord
with that good coffee, good chocolate?
It is something, to eat for pleasure. It is an impossible thing
to eat only for pleasure. Payment would be pleasure.
It isn’t the same as begging. There’s another way,
like a field beast imagines a career paid
in apples, a way to open the mouth
that keeps it open. For me, it would be apples.
Not like other plants which work
into tea or tobacco or the cacao pod or the coffee berry.
Hoping to catch recalcitrant fruit in my sleep,
I knot my hem to the apple tree.
I said apples.
I want to talk about pleasure.
Like the lovers who don’t seek a mattress,
I lay down in a deer-less city,
orchards, sugar-rich, branches all the way down.
Apples fall onto my sleeping figure,
and the cidery dress,
cousin-moths eat it up delicious.
I’m not paid to be beautiful and full.
Everyone knows what I eat.
Asa Drake
Asa Drake's writing is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry from The New School and was a finalist for Gold Line Press's 2017 Chapbook Competition. She lives in Florida.
