(The annual Oilmen's) Lobster Feed
by Mark Samcoe

                  some people forget to live as if a great arsenic
                   lobster could fall on their heads at any moment
          from Sixty by Stephen Dunn

You're catering to men you knew
back when work was solving for y;

girls preferred boys who could go 4-high,
and the best pickup line was, arguably, a Ford.

Here, the only women invited were hired to leave
nothing to the imagination of men who don't know

what it's like to be hardened by the unattainable.
A girl in the velvet of your parents' '81 Pontiac

would be tantamount to an instantly forming petroleum,
a cut of cocaine that cleared arteries.

For these men, who have always found hard bodies
easy to master, the perverse is a softer impossibility,

like working off a gut through telekinesis. You watched
lobsters, boiled alive, turning an angry red,

Men ponying up hundreds for the carrot
a stillettoed woman thrust in and out of herself.

They answered Miami? when you asked about vice.
You blame their mothers' breasts, not the poison

you've poured from speed-spouts all night, so potent
that peroxide is the only antidote, and silicon has you

stuck between what is and isn't. You still believe yourself
to be unrecognizable, until a name gets put to your face,

then a few stiff drinks, and the dollop of whipped cream
on a woman's accomplished breast. You lick,

thinking postage stamps, groping for the shotglass,
as if an ounce of indecency could chase any memory

of wanting to call Jennifers, Christines, to ask
where they were taken, how fast,

and whether life returned to anything remotely normal,
the morning after.

Mark Samcoe will meet his future wife. tonight.