Hey, Venus by Maureen Kingston

Venus of Willendorf, estimated 28 000 B.C.E.

Hey, Venus

I’m watching my husband watch the PBS cameraman, who’s watching and recording
Kilauea’s underwater flow, and he’s not comprehending at all why he can’t look away,
the attraction’s so primal, hardwired into him, he doesn’t recognize it for what it is: a
peep show, Earth’s tabasco sauce meeting Pacific spume, giving birth to cascading
mounds of pillow lava: a new landscape being born right in front of him on the seabed. 
 
And I love, too, that he doesn’t know he’s staring at art, at the Venus of Willendorf,
unashamed in his lust for her, freed from the herd pressure to prefer the Big Island’s
bony palms; unconsciously enjoying my ugli-fruit figure, drawn to the volcano’s
magmatic breasts, to her suss-sussing song; seduced once again, like his first time, by
the girl who whispers, Skip the condom, in his ear.
 
Maureen Kingston

This poem was first published in Gargoyle.

Maureen Kingston’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, B O D Y, CHEAP POP, Gargoyle, Gravel, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Misfitmagazine.net, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, riverbabble, So to Speak, and Stoneboat. A few of her prose pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.