The Last Orgasm

The Last Orgasm

By Tobias Wray

 

Stars and people and daffodils won’t last forever.

Hands down, forever will succumb to a single sensation,

one last heaven, one last shudder     

lost voice carried over the winds of the body, the canyons

of the hands in a shower, snow or warm? Last ashes

of satisfaction dance above an open mouth, teeth like light

in an emptied room, the wet music of the tongue.

Somebody will find the edge to all of humanity’s joy, a flood,

a punctuation will flood her with its certainty,

or them, or us, all at once, and that lonely breach

will ripple through, on and out, with indefatigable atoms.

Those asking hands never to slow their speeding ship     

one last starry daffodil excess will blow its soft dunes,

that lost voice, back, over everything that ever came

before. Until emptied out. And if you slow, if you slowly reach

across your own body until you feel it, too, even now?

You can come to an end, even now. It lasts, wanting to.

 

About this Poem

 

“I often wonder about pleasure and how we talk about it, and about what happens in the silences beyond that is more alluring still. Those things are marked by the limits of our imagination, which it is the work of poetry to understand and expand. I wrote ‘The Last Orgasm’ in the spillover energy from a prose project on the sublime. In some ways, this poem serves as a meditation on the sublime edge between what we can witness and what we cannot bear to. It is also simply a love poem.”—Tobias Wray

 

About the Poet

 

Tobias Wray is a writer, teacher, and arts organizer.

 

Poems, reviews, and other writing appear widely in literary journals, including on Verse Daily, Poem-a-Day, Impossible Archetype, The Arkansas International, Hunger Mountain, and The Georgia Review. His work has also been anthologized in Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press) and elsewhere.

 

An assistant professor at the University of Central Oklahoma where he directs UCO’s Creative Writing Programs, his interests range from experimental poetics to queer and speculative literatures to literary translation. He served as director of undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Idaho until 2021. He was a poetry editor for Cream City Review and, until 2017, helped to coordinate Eat Local :: Read Local, a program that partners restaurants with poets from Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin.

 

He is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.