PLAN B PRESS Issue Mary Ann Larkin The following poem comes from gods & flesh, published by Plan B Press in 2006. The manuscript for this book came to us through a poetry contest submission. The reader told me that even if it didn't win the contest, I ought to give this manuscript another look. It's a reader I respect. So I listened to him and read the manuscript and decided to publish it. The book's cover, which Larkin insisted we use, reprints an image of a sculpture by Nancy Webb entitled Dea Mater. This chapbook, unfortunately, has sold out of its print run.   HOW IT WAS We had no future, only sex and tenderness, its blue flower. That’s what we had and it wasn’t enough and it was. Bodies with no future shine bright. No words only seed and flesh cossetted and curved, belly and skin and bone on bone. We arced in and out of ourselves, earned no reprieve even as tenderness flowered in the sated crevices, the limp arms and lidded eyes of our exhaustion. There was a sea. It was summer. It was dawn and noon and night. It was a small white room. It was ten days, maybe twelve. That’s how it was.   Mary Ann Larkin is a poet, teacher, and writer—author of six books of poems, most recently That Deep and Steady Hum (Broadkill River Press, 2010). Her other books are chapbooks of poetry: The Coil of the Skin, White Clapboard, The DNA of the Heart (with her husband Patric Pepper), A Shimmering That Goes With Us, and her Plan B Press book, gods & flesh. Her poetry has appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, including America in Poetry and Ireland in Poetry, the art and poetry series published by Harry N. Abrams,and Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, published by Plan B Press. She has earned her living as a writer, fundraiser and teacher, most recently at Howard University in Washington, DC where she lives. She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.   Published in Volume 11, Number 3, Summer 2010.   To read more by this author: Mary Ann Larkin: DC Places Issue Mary Ann Larkin: Museum Issue