April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Two strangers fuck you into existence.
Then they tell you they love you.
They tell you they love you and then some.
“Weedee doodee doodee deee.”
“Pee on the potty.”
“Learn your tables of arithmetic.”
“Clean up your room.”
“How much pain I suffered putting you into this world!”
“Don’t get that girl pregnant.”
“Do you think that car runs on thin air?”
“Don’t become like your father!”
“Don’t listen to your mother!”
“When will you get a decent job?”
“Are you working on my grandchildren yet?”
“Why don’t you show some respect?”
“Is that why I worked my ass off for you?”
“You have it so easy. When I was your age…”
Blah, blah, blah.
You watch them all this time.
They claim they know you.
You wonder who they are.
Then they die.
Then you do.
by Nolan Keating
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
The truth? I couldn’t wait to split. Picture
a birdcage strung up on baroque unwritten codes
— like living in a police state, I told the serpent
when we ducked out for a cigarette
one night near the end, just before it all
blew to smithereens, just before my lewdness
cracked the perfect and perfectly boring landscape
(a top-ten “Places to See Before You Die”)
mapped in majolica on the tiled floor of Anacapri:
a paradise of rivers and islands, flowers and fish,
and all His weird experiments (zebras, giraffes).
I was incidental there, a thorn in someone’s side.
In the far corner — you have to lean in close
— the exiled Crown of Creation and I, his rib-bone,
trying to cover ourselves with ferns and fronds.
Observe how my long hair hides my smile.
Wouldn’t smoking be divine after sex?
the serpent asked me once. What’s that? I said.
by Jo Ann Baldinger
Jo Ann Baldinger lives in Portland, Oregon, where she writes poems, practices yoga, and tries to be patient. Her poems have appeared in Cirque, Verdad, Blue Mesa, Tsunami, and Onthebus.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
‘cause you planned to study law. And I may
have written this already: Habeus
Corpus in some other journal or book.
Latin got me through med school—I’d just look
in Stedman’s Dictionary—ah, corpus,
corpse, a body, just like yours, only, say,
a little stiffer, with perhaps, a bit
of an associated odor. But
I don’t smell so good. You’re the one whose nose
knows the bell’s tolling. Mine couldn’t tell whose
a flower and whose a. . .All right, what
did make you leave? Was it the kitty lit-
ter in the basement? The moldy sponges
in the sink? Oh, your constitution, left.
by Kelley Jean White
Kelley’s writing has been widely published since 2000 in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Friends Journal, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, the Journal of the American Medical Association and in a number of chapbooks and full-length collections, most recently Toxic Environment from Boston Poet Press, Two Birds in Flame, poems related to the Shaker Community at Canterbury, NH, from Beech River Books, and “In Memory of the Body Donors,” Covert Press. She have received several honors, including a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
