GORDON MASSMAN

V1n3
Summer 03

 

1181

 

POETRY

 

And the two romantic lovers having recently discovered each other's
overwhelming characteristics — the universe's most gloriously pinnacled —
praised God in perspiration-coupling, the bed a buckboard wagon, their
bodies jamming, the sun-becoming-moon-becoming-sun, surrounded by
wrappers of convenience store sandwiches and Hershey's Kisses, the
floor sticky as a cinexplex, praised God the continents on whose extrem-
ities they stood like upright Hoovers rotated them together, interpene-
tratedly, he a Pegasus, she a bronze athletic Rebecca of solid blood-
veins, they a bolt of industrial twine, heavy and significant. "We are
megaphonic," he exclaimed (she hairtrigger orgasmic between the thighs,
and he her master architect), "we are invulnerable," from some pyscho-
megalo emerald precipice zagging through the roof of heaven, bare-
chested overgazing the world. Marriage being superfluous under such
pressure — superfluous and laughable — they will strap on various girdles —
rubber or otherwise — to prevent volcano offspring, his very squigglers
whipping against their flesh-prison like galloping horses against the flam-
ing barn — mein melting urgency, my man, in such mock multiplication.
Our baby shall be an exponential multiple of our magnificence. And so
they panted and heaved and doubled over and splayed and stuck up like a
mizzen mast and drank down like a cataract while fools labored and
sucked up yapping and strategizing like doomed lieutenants. Let us be
plain: flesh is everything. Magnolia flesh, orchid flesh, elephant ear flesh,
human flesh engorged with liquids, overflowing, pooling the universe,
Jesus being the pale mantra of the desiccated. And so our heroes straight-
pinned their floating oil-dot eyes, depth charged their ear drums, devour-
ed their O's, but spared their tongues needed for innumerable flicking
and occasional forking. One of them ritualistically shot their mom with
a keyboard-powered Lexmark cartridge, she slumped over ritualistic-
ally dead. But let's not swerve. Now the cilia of their womb, like the
guts of an over-sanctified fig, rot, slimy to touch, send out a stench. The
vagina of the floor opens wide its jaw and gulps down in waves like a
snake its prey their welded together bones, their eggs and minnows into
its esophagul pit, mould topside in their bed, filth and viral writhe. Let
it be said that iron drove their love, implacable iron blocks tamped their
blood and hardened around handles Superman God gripped, swung,
and hurled into the euphoric universe, slamming them inextricable, and
let, "a raging hunger nailed them to a depthless kiss," be their epithet.

 

Gordon Massman has published in numerous journals across the US, Canada, and the UK (Harvard Review, Antioch Review, Prism International, Windsor Review, Fire, Georgia Review); his third small press book, The Numbers, was recently published by Pavement Saw Press.