DUCK SEX
The male mallard, his emerald head slick as Valentino’s, carries his penis inside-out, coiled like a fist, within his sleek belly.
A female presents her perky, inviting rear; he mounts her in the smooth water, rings rippling as they couple.
Then, in an explosion, his impossibly long member unfurls in rag-curl spirals filling her hollow helix.
While he shudders in parabolas of pleasure, his sperm slaloms home, through his pearly corkscrew into her waiting egg.
But in the duck world, females are scarce. Single drakes, often rejected, frantically seek release. The frenzied male pursues any female and takes her violently. Female ducks, often injured, sometimes die of their wounds, blood swirling into the water.
A female duck does possess a weapon, though. Contracting with all her might, her vagina becomes a labyrinth of dead ends and secret cul de sacs, where the male’s seed, waylaid, will produce no offspring.
Perhaps, millennia from now, we female humans will evolve built-in weapons to combat aggressive tongues, groping hands, bruising cocks.
At the least, a twisted maze leading nowhere.
JUPITER AND IO
I glimpsed him once or twice, among the trees near my garden. I knew who he was because his eyes flashed thunderbolts.
Why me? He was a god, and I was just a kid, ordinary, a little on the plump side. I’d heard about his wife, her colossal jealousy; even he was afraid of her.
My mother had warned me, about the gods: Turn your back and run into the house, or there will be hell to pay.
Then one day—it was autumn, sky blue, leaves russet and gold— I was sitting next to an urn in the garden, dreaming. A fog came, smoky, grey, so thick you could barely see through the billows. I felt its sweet, cool moisture on my bare neck, I shivered with pleasure and my cheeks grew hot; my robe slipped onto the rock where I was sitting; the cloud wafted around my neck and down my arms and then I felt another shiver, and fingers wrapping around my hand, and a strange awakening between my legs, and I trembled, and the smoke and fog were thickening and I saw his face, emerging from darkness, indistinct, but I recognized his handsome features, his deep, hypnotic eyes. And I was undone.
And then? You’ll never guess. Jealous Juno, the wife, must have been lurking around, because he hightailed it, the sky turned blue again, and I was left standing on all fours like a fool. I tried to yell at the bitch, but nothing came out but Moooo.
So I spent years calving, chewing my cud, getting milked, pestered by flies. The bastard took the best years of my life until one day, like magic, I woke up a woman, but by then I was a crone, my tits dried up, skin falling slack off my bones.
I limped off into the desert to spend my last days thinking about that thundercloud, and my one minute of ecstasy.
TREE OF LIFE
On first glance, it could be some trompe l’oeil camera work, sour-cherry-red tree, limbs bare of leaves, against a pale blue winter sky.
But look closer, and the sky turns to cloth, the branches shiny, slippery as they reach, reach for air.
Read the caption, and see the truth. The patient, struggling to breathe, slowly dying, desperately coughs.
Up through his throat, a fleshy origami slips, falls onto the bed, as air rushes briefly down.
The nurses gasp and point, and one gently retrieves the gory package, unfolds it, and spreads it on the cloth. Another pulls out her phone and a work of art appears, like a bronze sculpture emerged from its mold.
The clot is a tracery of bronchus stem bronchi, bronchioles of the left lung, branching each from the other. We do, after all, share a family tree with trees. Trees breathe out, we breathe in.
What a relief it must have been to cough up this clotted blood, sour-cherry-red on a rough cloth, branching, branching.