now
I found that there should be some added…”
—Cindy
Meston, co-author of “Why Humans Have Sex,” Archives
of
Sexual Behavior (Volume 36, Number 4, August 2007)
18.
You were blocking the way to the refrigerator.
20.
You were my mayonnaise.
27.
Because we’d put all our clothes in the washing machine.
42.
Nin Andrews told me, “It always makes the corn
grow
faster,” and I wanted to get into your Farmer’s
Almanac.
43.
And I into your bales of hay.
44. I
had a thing for Christian Bale in Velvet
Underground
and The Prestige.
46.
I’d just slurped my Moon Pie.
53. I
had just seen Cicciolina in the Italian film
Monica:
Il Vulcano di Piacere, and I was about to
erupt.
55. I
was Bert the Cop in the remake of It’s a
Wonderful
Life. After I see you float by I tell
George
Bailey I’m going home “to see what the
wife
is up to.”
59. I
had these new grappling hooks I wanted to try
out.
62. I
pretended you were Tom Cruise playing air
guitar
in Risky Business.
63. I
pretended I was Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s
couch.
64. I
pretended I was the couch.
68. I
felt nasty, guilty of appropriation, and sex made
me
feel likable again.
71.
As Karl Marx declared: “I’m the worst I ever had.”
82.
It was because I liked to wink at our TV camera en
passant.
87.
I’ve always had a thing for good boys in letter
sweaters.
88.
I’ve always had a thing for letter carriers in blue
sweaters.
89. I
was watching The Postman Always Rings Twice
on
DVD when I heard the doorbell.
90.
It was only me, but we enjoyed the serendipity, and
I
gave you the ring I found in the Post Toasties box.
91.
The palm reader foretold it all—the ring that
smelled
like sugar, the chiming doorbell.
92.
It was Tuesday and she knew we always did it on
Tuesday,
and she liked to watch us from behind the
potted
palm.
94.
She found it more exciting as a simulcast.
109.
There was an hour to go before curfew.
113.
You promised me we could name our first
daughter
Chastity, just like Sonny and
123.
Then you said, “Everything is about sex except sex,
which
is actually about power and money,” making
me
feel richly powerful.
127.
Eating those apples, I felt young again.
142.
I always got excited thinking of myself as Saint
Monica,
who, as a young girl, was given in
marriage
to a bad-tempered, adulterous pagan
named
Patricius.
143.
I think of you that way, too. Or at least I’d like to
get
into the habit (if you know what I mean).
148.
I also liked to play the other Monica—chubby
Monica
of Beret-Humiliation, Hussy Monica,
Monica
the Duped.
150.
Sure I was a money-grubber, a gold-digger, but that
didn’t
mean I didn’t love you.
176.
Nin Andrews said, “We were cultivating one
another,”
but I was cultivating Catholic guilt.
179.
I was invested in making the right impression.
182.
To celebrate the one-dollar win on the two-dollar
lottery
ticket.
183.
To celebrate our third place winner Sparky at the
track.
187.
To celebrate the calibration between your orgasm
and
mine.
188.
To calibrate the leverage between your wants and
my
abilities.
191.
To conduct ourselves in a disrespectful manner.
193.
I was going on intuition.
197.
I was from the Kingdom of the Damaged.
198.
I lived in a little shack just down the hill from you.
199.
You were from the Kingdom of the Damaged.
200.
Half way between the Kingdom of the Damaged
and
the Hamlet of the Deranged.
201.
You were as irresistible and complicated as a great
poem.
202.
You were like a shimmering flower of eyes, hair
and petals.
211.
I was wearing my new saddle shoes—and your
wingtips
were all polished.
220.
Still we sailed onward, navigating via bi-polarity.
225.
How I longed to alphabetize your file cabinets.
231.
“Ah, Monica!” gushed the ever-ardent Stanislav
Shmigegi.
“I’ve found you at last!”
232.
But was it too late? We weren’t as ferocious, even
though
you were kind, ignoring my love handles.
233.
And I admit: I’d changed, too. Same mask and
tightrope,
one overshoe and my bicycle wheels on
backwards.
235.
And then we remembered: that little place next to
the vibrator repair shop in line 5.
-- Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh
I like the poem’s inventiveness, its brio and its spirit of
play, all of which depend to some extent on its extravagant length. Taking off from the absurd pedantic epigraph,
the poem rolls on, generating itself from line to line and seeming as
inexhaustible as its subject. I also
like the way the poem moves, shifting nimbly as it embraces a grab bag of
material including little film scenarios (invented and borrowed), miniature scripts
for porn films and sex fantasies, word play, jokes, double entendres, tiny
domestic scenes, and much much more. As
also fits the subject, the poem is having a very good time.
-- Patricia Carlin
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