Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsSpring 2011 v10n1
DIANE SEUSS

Either everything is sexual, or nothing is. Take this flock of poppies

smoke-green stems brandishing buds the size of green plums, swathed
            in a testicular fur. Even those costumed in the burlesque of red crepe
                         petals have cocks under their skirts, powdered with indigo-black pollen,

staining everything they touch. Either the whole world is New Orleans
            at 3 a.m. and a saxophone like a drill bit or it’s all clinical sunlight and sad
                         elementary school architecture, circa 1962, no broom closets opening into escape

hatches, no cowpokes with globs of sap skewered on hickory sticks. Either
            it’s all New York in 1977, the Pan Am building lit up like a honey hive and erecting
                         itself out of the fog, and one of us is a junkie and one of us is naked under a gold

skirt safety pinned at the waist and the material melts in the rain, either Kinky
            is playing the Lone Star and Earth is the women’s john at the tail end of the bar
                         and the stall doors have been blow-torched at the hinges and dragged away

by horses, either cunnilingus is an ocean salting every alleyway and lifting
            every veil or the French teacher did not masturbate beneath the desk as he taught
                         the subjunctive, and lightning did not cleave the cherry tree and pleasure

its timbers. Either straitjacket, or shock treatment orgasm igniting the dinner theatre,
            the actors cradling and hair-pulling, kissing each other so deep some might call it
                         brain surgery, the wigs slipping, chintz curtains aflame, codpieces bursting

into flower, or what’s left is a book of wet matches, my dear,
            and it’s all been for nothing, for didn’t Jesus say you are either
                         with me or against me, from out of his blossom of bloodshot dust?  end