Eleanor Goodman

Affair

In the slow moments
after we have made love

you peel a tangerine
and let the juice drip

onto the sheet
and your naked smooth chest

as you hand me
the bigger half and tell me

eat
and we’ll do it again in the dark 

and leave me
with the sweet fruit slipping 

down my throat and your eyes
shuttered like the windows

pinning me to the bed

Eleanor Goodman

Eleanor Goodman is a writer and a translator of Chinese literature. She is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University, and spent a year at Peking University on a Fulbright Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome and was awarded a Henry Luce Translation Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her book of translations, Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014) was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant. Her first book of poems, Nine Dragon Island, will be published this year.

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