As children, there were no body-part words
for what the cows, horses, pigs, chickens
cats and dogs were doing
But we all knew they were making babies
And that it was as good and happy
as a 60-bushel wheat crop
This simplicity moved right into our farmhouses
where language for bodily functions became necessary
My father used Pisshole and Asshole
when he told stories to his cronies
My mother preferred a more refined Number 1 Place
and Number 2 Place for my brother and me
Like they were addresses
I didn’t know anything about Number 1½ Place
until its basement flooded red after I turned 14
Exploration led to the discovery that Number 1½
was multistoried and that an entire finger could visit
And that it would receive and even welcome houseguests
No one talked about this kind of real estate back then
I didn’t know the word vagina until Junior Class Biology
I learned I wasn’t alone when the boy sitting behind me
whispered to his buddy that it was really a twat
A word I’d heard before in the halls
and thought was the past tense of twit
But I like thinking of it as my little piece of property
How its value increased exponentially when it served
as an annex through which two daughters passed
How it’s slowly becoming an historic site
Who knows how many men who slept there
will prove to be famous
—From Lockie’s chapbook Sex & Other Slapsticks (Presa Press, 2019); appears here with her permission.
is widely published and awarded as a poet, nonfiction book author, and essayist. The recently released Sex and Other Slapsticks (Presa Press, 2019) is her fourteenth chapbook. Earlier collections have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England Competition, and the Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award. Her poems have found their way onto broadsides, buses, rented cars, bicycles, cabins, greeting cards, key chains, bookmarks, mugs, coffee-sack labels, church bulletins, radio shows, and cable TV as well as into hundreds of national and international journals, magazines, and anthologies.
Ellaraine has received multiple Pushcart nominations and fellowship residencies from both Summer Literary Seminars and Centrum Literary Residencies. She teaches writing workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine Lilipoh.
