5 by monica mcclure

Image By Peter Cole Friedman

SKUNK HOUR

I am starting to have fun
Some people are on their honeymoons because they have salaries
paid vacations and sick days
Some people are squeezing out the afterbirth
in their hospital beds and feeling ok
Another way of saying I don’t agree is saying I don’t believe in it
My domestic partner is patting me on the back with strokes of conciliation
His phone is always buzzing with sexless missives
I don’t believe in intentions in this neoliberal context
Pitted binaries of male universality stroked by Uma Thurman’s scream
I don’t have an age, just suspension & Millay
I would rather flirt with a hick than be a female lumpy space
How many times have you seen the word noble in front of intentions
That’s the problem with intentions: they are bourgeois, they are in English
and will drive you to drink
miles of millstones
Perhaps I cry because I can’t believe how much there is
that I don’t believe in
Whatever I am, please look later

WAR

We can’t speak Spanish to our grandparents
Corina gave her a name like Kimberly crossed with Timothy
She threw a baggy of crack rocks down it sounded like dice
Chinge le chinga le chinga le winge le
a coto moroto moroto man
This was in a mobile home at the entrance to a ranch road
where Tom was killed ending the 17th century of my human life
NAFTA is us oh hominy hominy hominy how many
boys are in the backyard with guns

OFF-DUTY MODEL

It’s money time
Bar Pitti is awash in late afternoon dank
The sun is nuclear rubble on my wrist holding the menu askew
Sometimes life is too self-loving
In a big hat my brows are slugs
I’m vexed by the cruelty of bees
Hum with me oh ye dead ingenues gone to Kansas full of blame
When I’m old I’ll be free
When I’m horny I can’t have sex because I am ovulating
When I’m on birth control I can’t have sex because I am not horny
When I’m pregnant I can’t have sex because I’m blown out
When I’m a mother I can’t bear to live
When I can have sex anytime I want I am sex negative
When I can’t have sex I am full of it
The director sought his virgin idea in plain waters like a fop
I will forgive anything of the man I love
for I am arranged like a snail: front-loaded
with antennae too supple for the big haul
Goofy dangerous American complex
I’m a big ole haul of a thing nevermind the stunned pupils
A smart woman is a stylish stalking foil
Cruel bees sucking all the life from the poor flowers
Step lightly minx the camera can’t backpedal too fast

MIMOSA TREE

A voice is duplicitous
Mine sounds like a child’s
I love my family inappropriately
We were all born together, mother father and six siblings
from my womb, romantically
every-one's voice eventually matured except for mine
It’s my own fault
Rescue me pink slipper tree I remember
I like to sit around and make out
which is unkempt
And every year my apartment gets smaller
and further away
failure, impediment, split
No one has asked me to sign a contract
that is actually a drawing of a palm tree yet
Sisters and brothers I’m sorry
I guess everyone is going to fool me
until I get a big girl voice
until my thigh gets rubbed the right way
fuzzy poms float down

PRIVATE EYES

Although I am adulterous it had never occurred to me
to live a secret celibate life
I’m going to
All relationships are libidinal let’s be honest
Even good men are assholes
Mine is an asshole
Do I care? I wonder.
This poem is wasteful
of the darkness
allotted for it
as long as I'm getting these sexts
I’ve got only one hand
Sometimes art has to be like that, too
off-kilter but dipping deep
from the public center

MONICA McCLURE’s debut collection, Tender Data, will be published by Birds, LLC this year. She is the author of the chapbooks, Mood Swing, from Snacks Press and Mala, forthcoming from Poor Claudia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Jubilat, Fence, The Los Angeles Review, The Lit Review, Lambda Literary Review’s Spotlight Series, The Awl, Spork and elsewhere. She curates Atlas, a collaboration series of visual artists and poets, and lives in New York City.