• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Molly Peacock: The Diva

May 10, 2011 by PBQ

D was done with it
and it meant everything.
Done with demands, denial,
the drama of hope.
D hadn’t lived all his decades for nothing.
Devotion?  Spare me, D thought.
D was closing doors. Click-click—done.
When they were all shut behind him,
there opened a corridor of woods.

And another thing I’m done with,
D declared to himself, Sex.
I’m done with the dreck of it.
The minute he said that he felt both relief
and dismay.
Damn, I’m disoriented, he thought.
It was dusk in the dell.
Nothing to do but continue
through the dimming light.
Did he hear a divertimento?

Dreams. . . .
They were the forest corridor!
(He’d slammed all his doors like a demon
and now released his daimon.)
How dendroid he was, he noticed, shaped like a tree.
Why not close the last door?  he asked himself in the dusk.
There weren’t any doors anymore,
just the stuff doors were made of, the woods.

A dragonfly dove down
and flew up a damselfly.
D looked down then:
he was awfully old and disheveled and droopy.
He could be a man or a woman, it hardly mattered.
Oh why not, he thought?
have a bit of an adventure  before the very end?
He made his choice.
D was Delta after all, the triangle.

A divan appeared in the dell.
D lay down, melting a little,
from dismissive to something like delighted,
but drier.  He was a diva now, a dried diva.
His penis morphed just a little, to a more clitoral shape;
his old testicles were sort of shrunken anyway;
just a little bit more and they’d be labial wattles.
It was a soft landing when he jumped sexes.

D heard the sound of water.
Oh, was the divan near the beach?
D was glad she hadn’t closed the door on dream.
She lay down, curling up,
with two hands under her chin
like a sleeping child or praying angel
as all dissolved, everything into everything else
air to water, water to air
disobedience into inclination
disappointment into a pleasant dampness
a humidity, a drink for her old dry skin
as the world dissolved from darkling to darling.

Filed Under: Contributors 82, Issue 82, Prose, Prose 82 Tagged With: Contributors 82, Molly Peacock, Prose, Prose 82

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ March Slam Session!

PBQ @ the Pen & Pencil!

PBQ Slam Session!

Slam Session with PBQ!

PBQ @ Poetry Tent!

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org