Vox Populi
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Meg Pokrass: Quack
He tells her this: “When ejaculating, I quack.”
“Promise?”
She’s poking water next to him — tipping front, then back, and then over again, looking at the sky, sideways.
He gets her feathers moving in such a good way. Shy, yet it does not impair her ability to look directly back, into his bright, bright bill.
She looks away, then straight into his bulbing eyes.
He amuses her with whispers of his friend’s attempt to corkscrew females with promises of Fritos.
“Fritos,” she tells him, “never work with me.”
She bubbles, preening her drab brown sweater— terrible next to his bright bill.
As he climbs her, she paddles and slaps water as though she can go somewhere.
Quack!
A middle-aged woman, strolling the pedestrian path with her husband, stops to watch. Says, “How come, in duck-land the male is so goddamn beautiful?”
Her husband, slight of hair, not quite her height, puts his arm around her and sighs.
Copyright 2016. From The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down by Meg Pokrass published by Etruscan Press. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.
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