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Asexual Reproduction

Published onDec 09, 2024
Asexual Reproduction
·


Asexual Reproduction 

You bastard, I saw you get out of her car.
Every night at one or two, a new episode
broadcast from the street. The window open,
swollen in its jamb. The children closed,
sweating in swirled sheets. An inspector
found black mold on the coils of the old air
conditioner, so until the duct guys
install salvation, everyone lives in the world. 

Screaming softens into sobbing. The bastard
says Nothing happened and can't even convince
himself. Tree frogs purr in the broken maple.
Someone else's cat chants at our door. My
husband is away again, moving his sick mother.
My kind of sick, the cough, the rashes,
is no cause for worry. Get some good air
and that heart will begin to behave again. 

The neighbor's alone now, smoking, phoning
everyone she knows: I'm gonna call her, text her,
make her life a fucking hell like she did to me.
By Wednesday it'll just be him and the kid
who's also outside shrieking at the frogs. 

I want mommy. But Baby, you're with daddy now.
I scratch at poison ivy hives that smolder in the dark,
shapeless as bad feeling.
Don't want to know about anyone's 

wrecked life or the lump at midnight o'clock
in my right breast. Sleep's instrumental music,
please, or even the inhuman voice
of a horn or rising breeze. The husband home,
the pulse in a groove. As if a vine would
grow that way, spore land only where they're told.
Why did you bring me here, I know you're sneaking
around, she yells, and the syllables waft away,
thriving in the heat, adapted for dispersal. 

Vol. 43, no. 1, 2014

Lesley Wheeler, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of six poetry collections, including Mycocosmic (Tupelo Press, March 2025) and The State She’s In. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Pleiades, Poetry, Ecotone, and Massachusetts Review.

 

 

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