poems: Marty McConnell

song of the mysterious and elusive female ejaculation
 

to refer to the female orgasm as a landmine
detonating is to ignore the ways
the world is remade through light. a kind
of frailty is required of us
for anything beyond breathing in the same
room. I am vulnerable
when my hand is inside you. any
stray tiger or hurricane
could take me down, unaware.
the air over my mattress
is a coda, a held breath, the licking
fuse. somewhere
a barn is on fire. or a monastery,
men running everywhere
with buckets and rugs. inside my right arm
a battalion of hummingbirds
prepares to defend the homeland. to give
a female limb, say,
your leg, the properties of a predatory
animal, say, a lion,
is to steal artifacts from the museum
and rebury them
in the Egyptian sand. when your body opens
its decadent clasp,
the voltage behind every pornographic film
you’ve ever watched
quickfires my studied mouth. these
are the risks we hazard
to come, to bring to coming, to cup
and carry what spills
from us, from these brilliant,
these astonished
and productive bodies.
 
 
 
the gravitational pull of the impossible
for RH

according to Science, the attraction
between a stable object and the Other
is directly proportional to the Other object’s
relative in-stability. where X equals sexual
compatibility and Y equals the ability
to return a phone call within an appropriate
and/or agreed-upon period of time, the answer
is (a) Google images at 2 a.m., (b) just one
more glass and then I’m going home, or
(c) forfeit. for every action, there is an equal
and opposite disappearance. in layman’s
terms, this can be expressed as “two steps
forward, one step peeling away of the getaway car
in the night.” entropy means, nobody gets
what they want. for the universe to be born,
six quazillion stars had to die. most nights,
even the impossible are alone.

 
 
 
MARTY McCONNELL is the director of Vox Ferus and a co-founder of the louderARTS Project. Her first full-length poetry collection, “wine for a shotgun” is forthcoming from EM Press, and her work recently appeared in A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry; City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry; Indiana Review; Crab Orchard; Beloit Poetry Journal; Drunken Boat; and is forthcoming in Gulf Coast and Muzzle Magazine. She lives in Chicago. www.martyoutloud.com