Chicago Review 46:1
SPRING 2000
 
 

HEATHER McHUGH
 
 

JUST SOME

Monday minus sex, man in the air, mom
in the moon-milk, God, your zip code
keeps eluding me. Oh one,
oh one, oh one.

Hexagonad, you're pent up plus.
You aren't most numb,
like any bombast gas's additive--
your metric is comparatively
uncontainable, your come

all emanations, weep all throes.
Spare us, spare us a sea,
spare us a sec.  Our
weather is what
your will wasn't--
ever (over and over) to be.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

ONE RED LIP

Not enough skin
to cover her face, said Chekhov:  in order
to open her mouth she had
to shut her eyes, and vice
versa.

Gusev's body flew off shipboard
into the cloudy sea.
Prompt shark,
bad angel, 
Valéry.

O my fathers, must a pain reside
in tenderness?
root at the tooth
of passion?

Must one have a heart of winter
just to look, and not to see?
I was an aesthetician, went 
to school for it, but was
not cured.  Instead,

shagged with fire, 
I was blind, 
bound

from the fold to the rack. 
O shackmates, you made me 
a palace of embraces:  places 
to be.  Arrière-arriviste,
lapper at the heels
of fraternizable
eternities,

I'd settle in a flash.  Off with
his bodkin, up
with her chemise, and oh
the babies were all appetite 
for opportunity, were
toddlers, teeners, twenty-niners,
looker-takers:  pennies pouring from their eyes; 
nickels from their knuckled fists, 
diming, dollaring, goldening along.  It's not
that they are wrong--they're young--
but sooner or later a man, a lover of jokes,

no looker, no Jove, just a man, 
will curl like a child in its crib and will
not loose his daughter's hand.  What they mean 
when they say his lungs are filling up is 
someone better
wipe his lips. 
Touché, 

said the swashbuckler.
I see, in a glancing blow off Mercury, my own
damn headstone, grin to split its
tightlipped overbite.  Were we 
what we wanted, or held, 
or had?  She had a mouth 

like a torn pocket, said 
my soon-to-be-
dead dad.