like teenagers too big for their rapturous, ever-growing bodies, Mr. Robertson and Mrs. Wilkins fill the handicapped stall in the men's room of a Walmart in Norman, Oklahoma
He, a thirty-five year old man
as well as a distinguished Joyce scholar, clutching at his flaccid member as if he were five and it was a garden snake slithering in the backyard as she, a thirty-three year old woman a few years removed from earning her doctorate in biochemistry, joins him in the never-ending chase
Neither had took the time to think
intellectually about the various reasons why they never did the thing and why they were about to the thing now nor would they have predicted such an encounter, unkempt, but as midnight comes and midnight goes several fleeting, titillating discussions on the sensuality of Shakespearean literature start to rile up the aging bones even as the rum turns the already incomprehensible conversations all the more
incoherent. She whispers seductively
that her cat, Catulhu, and his two cats, Rosencatz and Kittenstern, should partake in a ménage à trois to which he replies, coyly, "Je le veux beaucoup, beaucoup." Pretty soon, they rub the flesh off each other's bodies, stumbling down the street saying, "your place is too far," or "no, no, my place is too far," until the local Walmart seems the only reasonable solution. She chirps when he enters into that final frontier, across the fruited plains, where coy men do fear to tread and he grunts because he feels the sound moment- appropriate and even masculine though it startles her when first it escapes. Then, the music of their love seeps beneath the crack of the bathroom door, into the aisles and out past the automated doors, where it passes a family-owned Beer and Wine Store, several trees and the twenty- somethings feeling each other up beneath the branches and the warmth of the moonlight into the ears of a grief-stricken-former-mother whose tears slip past the cracks in the pavement and wet the very eyes of the devil.
Originally published in Poetry Quarterly, Spring 2014