David Huddle

Genital Epistemology

1.

don’t it make you snicker how desire goes

everywhere incognito undiscussed

but witnessed by every man woman and child

in a blink the mind carries out the sex

calculation to what extent do I

yearn for intimacy with this person I’m

seeing/talking to/playing cribbage with no

matter how far-fetched wrongful damaging

comic or impossible the results zap

through our brains level of attraction low

or high odds of it happening zero

or maybe or likely but all too often

a little secret erupts yes damn right

I’d do that and we take it to our graves

2.

that we had the hots for our flirty aunt

here in our town a much admired Spanish

teacher forty-two years old, mother of two,

caught having sex in the back seat of her car

with her seventeen year old student must

have gone crazy with love lust for that boy

then there was the writer who met her

biological father when she was

in her thirties and he in his fifties

their decision to become lovers she

says came out of rational discussion

not one of us can claim we have nothing

in common with people like that between

our legs lives knowledge we can’t speak aloud.

Author: David Huddle

David Huddle teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English.  His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry, Shenandoah, Agni, Plume, The Hollins Critic, and the Georgia Review.  In 2012 his novel Nothing Can Make Me Do This won the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction, and his poetry collection Black Snake at the Family Reunion won the Pen New England Award for Poetry.  Huddle’s novel The Faulkes Chronicle appeared from Tupelo Press in Fall 2014, and a poetry collection, Dream Sender was published by LSU Press in Fall 2015.  In 2016, a novel, My Immaculate Assassin, appeared from Tupelo Press.  Another novel, Hazel, was published in 2019, and his most recent poetry collection, My Surly Heart, was published by LSU Press in 2019.  With Meighan Sharp, Huddle has co-authored a poetry collection, Effusive Greetings to Friends, which will be forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press very soon.

 

 

**Photographer:  Molly Huddle Coffey

Plume: Issue #34 April 2014