Contributor’s Marginalia: José A. Alcántara responding to January Gill O’Neil’s “Clit Ode”

When I first read “Clit Ode”, I was reeled in like a hungry fish. The staccato opening: “Peach pit sucked clean.” The steadily lengthening lines that build to the sonic marvel of “the surf’s rough tongue.” The tonal switch to the personal: “Afternoons we wasted….” Then January jerks the hook: “I climb a trellis into the wild familiar.” And I am caught. I stop fighting. I willingly give myself to the magnolia trees, the stars, the coyote, the “aching in the low light of winter.”

“I climb a trellis into the wild familiar.” In which the metaphor tells the deeper truth than the explicit ever could. How could I not steal that line?!

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An Oral Cosmogyny

As my lady climbs the trellis
into the wild familiar, I go down

down down to the dark depths
of creation, where beings shine

of their own light, way down
where the tongue has no words

but is merely a muscle moving,
tasting; where sound is pure vibration –

pulse and surge, thrust and heave –
where continents rise and fall,

crash together and rend apart,
where, among the boom and break,

she lies, still, silent, glowing,
an arch holding up the heavenly world.