Priapus Waking Up Hard
- Priapus Waking Up Hard
So his parents won't catch him pitching tent,young Priapus tiptoes past their bedroomto take his first piss,
bent over the bowl,nursing the swelling from his dream's black widow bite,or the bone-chill from his dream's winter starving,which he can't push down, not even by thinkingof bloodletting's old ways, with leeches andspring-loaded lancets, of course he flecks the clean porcelain yellow,
so down the stairs softly he goes and outthe back door to the unmown field wherewithout a hand for miles he makes a fountainhigher-arcing than the front garden's,
his own soul at attention, every lost REM-sentmemory and every hidden desirerisen all at once from the loamy earth. [End Page 31]
Alex Chertok has work published or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review Online, the Missouri Review, the Cincinnati Review, Quarterly West, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets 2016, among others. He was awarded a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and completed his MFA degree at Cornell University, where he was also a lecturer. He currently teaches at Ithaca College and through the Cornell Prison Education Program.
