Dion O’Reilly
Accidental Fuck
Zipless. Uncontrollable.
Then you wake
from some sweaty unconscionable
yet somewhat enjoyable
night-time rollick.
You pull into the curve of your husband’s body.
He’s un-roused by your churning, your calling out,
your nighttime prowling
in the flop houses and tittie dives
of your subconscious,
where you do it with your bland colleagues
who wear button-up shirts
lined like pale graph paper,
with your silly-putty students,
your intimidating professor
with his big hands,
padded and seamed like a baseball glove,
or that one time with your transgender cousin.
All their dicks, so enormous
or sometimes, so shiny black,
you can’t refrain from gripping them,
their girth like the flesh handle
of a hammer you keep pounding
on the cruel nail of your need.
The astonishment every time,
the sight of its swelling
its measured intensity
like something born in time lapse.
The goat-like tumescence,
friendly, yet so clearly impersonal.
Maybe you just like how it feels—
after you’ve been taken
by the vortex forbidden —
to wake up, beached on the warm sands of relief
on the Ithaca of commitment,
your husband’s snores
gusting through your hair
like an off-shore wind.
Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in Narrative, New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Tupelo Quarterly, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, working at various times as a theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher, among other occupations.
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