eHARMONY:

WHIPTAIL LIZARD SEEKING WHIPTAIL LIZARD FOR FAKE SEX

 

~Patricia Young

 

In several species of lizards . . . only females exist.
– Science World.

 

I get so lonely out here on the chaparral,

darting beneath moon and mesquite.

 

Any day now I expect to go extinct.

 

I don’t date much.

I’m terrified of sling-shots

and Natural History museums.

My family’s poor as a footprint,

matrilineal trailer-trash all the way back

to Texas dirt.

 

I’m an interspecies love-child.

Does this make me hot stuff?

 

If I were a superhero,

I’d be Liza, the Bisexual Lizard Brain.

 

I’m a head-swiveler, an air-sniffer, a tongue-flicker,

a single parent of a

single parent of a

single parent.

 

Imagine me in nothing

but granular scales and stippled sunlight,

stretched out on a slab of warm granite.

 

Unisexual doesn’t mean

courtship rituals don’t turn a girl on.

 

My ideal mate is a hyperactive

five-inch dinosaur on dainty hind legs.

Think: gender bender baby.

 

The quickest way to my heart is a pulse.

The quickest way to my bed is on your sturdy tetrapods.

 

It’s Sunday morning and my blood’s

heating up fast. Sister Lagaritja,

I don’t need you

but I want you

 

to be my parthenogenic lover,

my next best guy.

If your DNA’s identical to mine

I’d love to scoot over the garden wall with you.

What I mean is,

I’d love to bask on your brick.

 

Erratum: a portion of Patricia Young’s poem vanished from print. Arc and TNQ regret the error; it’s a great poem, and we broke it. All required spankings have been administered.

Read the accompanying essay and see for yourselves the strange consequences of unintentional poetic fission out in Quarc.

Patricia Young’s 10th book of poetry is An Autoerotic History of Swings.

 

Various species undressed in Quarc! Offer ends soon—subscribe to both The New Quarterly and Arc for 38% off!