Procreation or Not
by Cathryn Shea
Sex was a kind of organic calamity,
a tremor along a fault line
that tilted shacks off their foundations,
a cloudburst over the creek
that washed out the bridge.
I know it’s a cardinal sin to disregard a meteor shower,
to miss the Lyrids that stream from Vega.
And Google Earth is a time capsule
of my neighborhood as it was
before the drought.
If I had lived when mythology was truth
I would be five feet nine
and I could have sex until I was slain
after I gave birth to triplets
at a hundred and ten.
My first foray into human spawning
was the back seat of a green Chevy Nova
and we went far; “no va’ we say now.
I didn’t know any better then
and I don’t know much more today,
if you stop to ponder noesis
and the vastness of thinking in the cosmos.
I’m reinventing a glossary for continuum,
my own bowling alley of worried gutter balls.
A transient conscience.
It’s been one of those no-end-in-sight kind of days, and it’s time to down a glass of something that reflects your mood. What would you like to drink?