THE GORKO’S WHOOPS SELECTION FOR 26-31 August
If I were investing
If I were investing, I’d short my own futures contracts,
But the female HR director’s platooning me
With no fewer than half-a-dozen guys in the factory:
One for the beard; and one for his centaur glutes and thighs;
Another for his greedy, gap-toothed grin;
One for brow-ridges overhanging his deep-set eyes;
One for shoulders that make the man
She’s making for her masturbation sessions.
My pal Ben’s a great example of someone who bought in
To a woman’s glittering resentment. Now he can’t distinguish
Any particular ‘you’ from a generalized, hypothetical one.
He keeps getting caught in a crossfire of overheard conversations
And total strangers thinking out loud. He always ends up
Looking around and saying to no one in particular, ‘Who, me? Who, me?’
I tell him with this kind of cognitive infirmity
He should stay away from social media,
As well as immersive violent video games set
In the so-called ‘real world,’ especially Grand Theft Auto,
At least until he has a better grasp not only of grammar and usage,
But geometry, even. I mean, I’m no savant,
Much less a fabled ‘shape-rotator,’
As involuntarily-celibate, low-status males
Pre-disposed to STEM-fields like to call themselves,
But I can tell you one thing: I don’t need to know the distance
Between the two cars stopped at the interchange,
Or the speed Ben’s travelling, to know he’s got no chance
Of squeezing through the gap. All I need to know
Is his head-full of meth
And the flashing lights in his rearview.
Ben’s about to roll a couple of eight-ball hemorrhage eyes
Into the corner-pockets, instead of getting
Away through the narrow dark he glimpsed ahead,
Bumpered on each side with the warm red glow of brake lights,
Scratching off the table if not out of the game
As part of the bargain.
Meanwhile the married HR director
With the husband who dreams of getting cucked
By the guys from the slitting department,
And maybe lamination, too, borrows her husband’s lathe
So she can carve the 3’ x 3’
Leftover from when he made the bannisters
To fashion a spindle of sinuous line and bulging, vegetable roundness
She’ll inscribe with parts of my anatomy
Using the set of hobby knives
She and her husband bought their son
When he turned twelve last year.
Turnip-shaped skinny jeans exaggerate her coltish strut
As she takes another walk through the smothering atmosphere
Of the hot and humid factory, so she can trace once more
In loving concentration my androgenic contours underneath
These ragged clothes that are stiff, discolored,
And half-dissolved with solvents, chemicals, and dyes.
She broke my image into parts, then hired a worker for each part,
Harvesting those features nature chose to signal
Reproductive fitness in the male, to knead and shape
In the enervated, muscular walls of her vagina
Like a cow chewing cud. Regurgitated, semi-degraded
Remnants of some original icon resonate somewhere deep inside
A waist-to-hip ratio like a mandolin
As her daily orbit pays its melancholy homage:
Keeping her distance, love in the aggregate and by proxy.
Her graven phallic image finished, imprinted on her birth canal,
I’m lost wax the inferno of her solitary lust
In conversation with itself
Melts to liquid running down her leg.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mark Parsons‘ poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in ExPat Press, Dreich, Cape Rock, and I-70 Review. His book of poems, Stills, was published by Southernmost Books in 2023. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
THEME FOR JULY-AUGUST
WHOOPS
Having put zero thought into choosing this summer’s theme we figure should make reading submissions that much more fun. Send themed subs on or after JULY 1ST to thegorkogazette@gmail.com with the word WHOOPS in subject line.
Images generated on Magic Studio, collage by Raddy
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