ISSUE 4 · SPRING 2010
Copyright © 2010 Joseph Harrington
| The History of Sexuality JOSEPH HARRINGTON Chapter 1 Once upon the beginning, the founder of Safety Day bred on this treeless plain. The zoo had its lean years: the animals served us food The barking ribbed-face deer consumed whole trees when the shelling ceased. Chapter 2 “Will the distinguished animal please declare himself a bug or a bird? We cannot abide generic ambiguity in unidentical flying objects— Condom and Gomorrah perished thus!” Chapter 3 Erotic fantasies disturbed him when he was not having them; their lack of evolutionary function caused him to write: “Mommy o mommy my head and my body want different things.” Chapter 4 “The peristyle is a clerestory,” he wrote, “penetrated by console brackets forming a transition to the ribbed surface of the cap.” Thus did the dome expand and contract, a symbol of the cheerful government where daddy is in charge of alphabets, where suffragettes in the basement rise from living rock like the ascent of man. |
Joseph Harrington is the author of Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan UP) and of Things Come On: An Amneoir (forthcoming from Wesleyan Poetry). His creative work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Otoliths, Fact-Simile, With+Stand, Cricket Online Review, and P-Queue, amongst others. He teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, USA and holds forth at the not un-scurrilous Blog of Myself.