This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
PACIFIC GEODUCK RESPONDS TO A MEME
Despite what you may think,
I am comfortably phallic.
I wonder if your punchline
can live for two hundred years,
burrowing through human muck
and blood and flushed tissues.
I am etymologically endangered,
but armoured, all about stamina.
Serious, grey-faced, occasionally
disturbed by dogfish, nibbled by sea stars.
I suppose we are both bottom feeders.
Word is I’ve been ground into a desperate
aphrodisiac, potion to get the blood pumping.
Blushes aren’t lost on me, the frantic
comparison. Images of me in the junk folder,
thinking about your subpar tackle box.
I’ll give you something to laugh about.
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Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. Her work has appeared in The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, trampset, Nimrod, and The Rialto. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.
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Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals, The Sounding Machine, and three chapbooks. Her writing and visual work have appeared in Blackbird, The Denver Quarterly, Gulf Stream, Waxwing, Analog Forever, Lomography, The South Dakota Review, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions, and is director of Liberal Arts & Sciences at VCUarts (Virginia Commonwealth University) Qatar.
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