Excerpt from Conduct of Our Loves
If the Angler fish can find a female
he attaches his jaws to her genitals:
their blood-systems unite,
his heart withers, and he degenerates into
a pulsing bag of sperm, fertilizing her
unto death. Still she swims through the vaults
of black waters, her angler glowing
from its forehead stalk of flesh: a Diogenes
barrelled by her mate
and her young, prowling in God's hunger . . .
"Conduct of Our Loves" first appeared in Ploughshares, vol. 18, no. 4
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