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The Narcoleptic’s Marathon
The hetero married version of a 69 is: she does the dishes
while he folds the laundry. The sadomasochistic version
of a hand job involves sandpaper gloves. My body
is an old house; you fix one thing and something
else breaks. Today at the beach, a dolphin
sucked the wedding ring right off someone’s finger.
The decay is down to your gums, said the dentist.
This cabinet will have to come out. The narcoleptic’s
marathon involves twenty-six beds and strategically placed
alarm clock stations. In Sweden, there is a little jar
for you to spit your dreams into, in the bathroom
when you wake up. In France, married couples
must have sex in front of beginners once a year.
Encularnuit. I never liked that molar anyway.
The hole in my mouth where tooth number eighteen was
feels like a burnt-out bedroom. When I was twenty,
this girl literally set my futon on fire, and the firemen
chucked my stuff from the kicked-out dorm window.
When I was twenty-one, a different classmate
metaphorically set my bed on fire and left claw marks
on my vertebrae, and we role-played a couple firemen
squirting us with water pistols. She had great teeth
and now she has a couple kids and a wedding ring
the size of a strobe light. When I see her
at our fiftieth reunion, I’ll whisper in her flower petal ear:
honey is the only food that never goes bad.
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Jeffrey McDaniel’s seventh book, Thin Ice Olympics, is coming out in September 2022 from Write Bloody Books. He is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently Holiday in the Islands of Grief (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Other books include Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (Pittsburgh, 2013), The Endarkenment (Pittsburgh, 2008), The Splinter Factory, The Forgiveness Parade, and Alibi School, all published by Manic D Press. McDaniel’s poems have appeared in numerous places, including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times, and Best American Poetry 1994, 2010, and 2019. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
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Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape, 1942, collage on paper, 255 x 305 mm.
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Author: Terence Winch
