ISSUE 2
 

Annie Lure

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Will I Consummate My Writing?

 

The desert labors like a postmenstrual woman. 

Its gatekeeper ties his bandana into a nuchal cord. 

I stroke a phallus as if a comb. It pulses with a poem. 

I peek through the thicket of phalli. 

The sky licks itself like a contented cat. 

I split the pod of a phallus. 

It ejaculates a poem in the shape of a baby foot stump. 

 

I Ghengis Khan¹ my animus. 

I serry Assyrian warriors, Stalin, and the Me-Too women. 

My fingers gobble my grandmother’s pomegranate orchard.

I pottery-wheel a pomegranate into a womb-well. 

In it, I fish for folktales, which I then hook onto personae. 

I fire pentacles of poems: 

Nineveh encrypted my gypsum.

Stalin hoards their brains the way a schoolboy hoards candy.

The TV gapes vagina-like on the living room wall. 

My writing hand is attached to a phallus strongarm. 

Genial light helmets my head. My blood armors my body. 

Critics lance my poem-heads.

I birth my agonism as poetry. 

I oblate it in the corpus of a nubile woman. 

 

The queen sits on a throne legged in phalli. 

Two buffalo-black cats flank her like Do Kamissa’s² doublets. 

She wields a phallus as if Lachesis’³ measuring rod. 

She fans herself with my animus:

There was once an anemic girl, she recounts.

Amid the milk crusts of her room,

she penned stylized poems

of ribs rocking airy children

and indigents quaking on the eye’s shore. 

Echo⁴ called out to Echo ad nauseum. 

Then she read in IEEE Spectrum of a Lamassu’s expropriation. 

In it, she recognized her own displacement.

So, she lent her voice to the Lamassu. 

The Lamassu’s mourning mourned her mourning.                                         
 

A mouth emptied itself into a navel ad nauseum. 

A navel emptied itself into a mouth ad nauseum. 

The girl visited Zimmerli Art Museum

and interpenetrated with a Russian nonconformist painting. 

She severed all these exchanges from their present times

and overlaid them onto her present time. 

The Lamassu brushed its woes onto

Stalin’s brainless masses. 

A reader corresponded them to a kidnapped friend. 

Thus, a coterie of itinerants grew into a settled tribe,

which grew into a town, which grew into 

a state, which grew into an empire. 

Priapic,⁵ the queen tips her penis, a scroll of poems, into a set of scales. 

My poems counterbalance a pile of gold. 

 

The answer is hastened maturation perishes. 

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[1] Mongol warlord and emperor of largest contiguous empire

[2] Epic of Sunjata from the Malian Empire: Do Kamissa transmogrifies into a buffalo to ravage her brother Diarra’s land for his ungratefulness.

[3] The middle sister of the Three Fates in the Greek pantheon, she measures the length of each life and appoints lots.

[4] Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Echo and Narcissus. Hera, Zeus’ wife, curses Echo, Zeus’ adulteress, who protects his licentiousness, with speaking only by repeating the last few words of another’s utterance.

[5] Ithyphallic Roman god of fertility. Fresco of House of Vettii in Pompei shows Priapus weighing his penis on scales counterbalanced with gold. A basket of fruit flanks his feet. Possibly apotropaic.

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