How Did Dinosaurs Have Sex?
by Lois Harrod
Like great astrological events
in a sixth-grade dream
Uranus aligns with Jupiter
to spawn meteors and moons.
Or just a cloaca for the necessary
comings-and-goings, a squirt affair–
for dinosaurs, like many birds,
probably did not have penises–
just spurted off in the right direction.
Ah, the problems of ejaculation
when the dominant species weighs tons and tons.
My twelve-year-old son wants to know
if they floated on the lake or lay face to face?
Perhaps on their sides, I say,
so those great protective plates
couldn’t come between.
Let’s imagine it as the union
of a morbidly obese medieval knight
with a two-ton Valkyrie, and we understand
what chain mail does to intimacy–
the complaint, I explain, of body builders,
so much armor between it and it.
He doesn’t blush and I continue
the sex lesson for the day.
Except for the problem of propagation,
the mechanics is not important.
It’s the foreplay, the strut and posture
along the Jurassic shore
to secure the dinosaur race
which, alas, didn’t make it
as we may not either.
Do be careful.
Lois Marie Harrod won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize 2012 (Poems& Plays) with her manuscript The Only Is, and her book Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis will be published by Cherry Grove in 2013. Her 11th book Brief Term: Poems About Teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press (2011), and her chapbook Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest (Iowa State University). Her Furniture won the 2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize. Previous publications include the chapbook Firmament (2007); the chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out (2005); Spelling the World Backwards (2000); the chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999); Part of the Deeper Sea (1997); the chapbook Green Snake Riding (l994), Crazy Alice (l991) Every Twinge a Verdict (l987). She won her third poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. Over 600 of her poems have been published online and in print journals including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Verse Daily and Zone 3. A Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, she teaches Creative Writing as an adjunct professor at The College of New Jersey. Read her work on www.loismarieharrod.com.