A Poem From Back a Ways

I don't have much going poem-wise. I'm prepping two books right now, my collection of stories that will be out soonish, and my novel (endlessly), whose ending I'm rewriting and whose polishing will take forever if I let it. It's been two years now since I 'finished' it. I hope it's worth doing.

Anyway, as promised, a poem I've probably linked before, from Girls with Insurance.

How Terror Might Work for John Smith, IT Guy

With the formless voices that bitch in his ear!
Instructions: cap your appearance off with a balaclava.

No one but the people on the mask's other side
will know. True terror does not require identity

revelation; otherwise one might set goals
for vengeance in one's yearly situation report.

This year was very poor for Terror Investors LLC: little
Jimmy from next door escaped our 23-hour-vigil,

lived to ram candy into sister Suzy's cute dark hair;
Mama had to cut it off. George at the office moved

to a corner suite with high-rise view and a leggy
blonde assistant taking dictation on her knees every day

at 12:15 as you stand by the coffeepot that never
works. Your wife and the coffee-brown pool boy

(ye gods, the hits just keep coming), licking batter sensuously
from the paddle of the Kitchen-Aid mixer you bought her

on anniversary ten: the blowjob anniversary, she said.
Somewhere in Pakistan Osama bin Laden aerates

his blood in an expensive machine as the United
States of Indecency sits on its hands. He laughs in his

beard. Homeland Security can't contain the domestic
rage of the auto industry or the corpse-fucking

of the banking industry. It’s time to go home. The baby
too lies like one dead on the sofa, sleeping off her future.

Comments

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg
We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer,
either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to
let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet
in those moments of a cold November day, we watched a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that.
Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline, concis, Gargoyle, The Westchester Revie…

June Poem Reviews

I've had fiction and non-fiction reviews published in quite a few journals and have been a member of the National Book Critics Circle, when I could afford it. Therefore, I feel quasi-professional in those arenas. I don't necessarily feel that way about my poetry reviews. I have opinions, though, and in the interest of keeping my poetry-mind occupied during an otherwise stressful time in my life, I'd like to make you, the poetry world, an offer. If you mail me your chapbook or book--at least 24 pages but no more than 100 pages, self-published or traditional--I will post a review of between 150 and 300 words about it, as professionally as I can, in the following months. Promise. Mail me your book, get a review. Easy. If I get a huge response, I'll declare a cap and communicate it here. I would prefer to work from print copies. I hate reading poetry in PDF or MOBI--my preferred methods for prose--because the lines never break correctly and I find myself critiquing lineati…

Bree

No Mote
black swans i almost didnt see
but for their glowy beaks
red as sumac- they didnt match
the dark tones of lake, stuck out
like your lust for me while i read to
the children all cloistered- who could
hear me even from the colonnade,
all hickory and hops-vine, where
i saw you watch me from inside
a white willow tree.

mergansers with their heads trailing
swam among dead stakes of lotus.
that belted kingfisher bode us a
good day, and returned the
children to their cages below bald
cypress knees so naked i had
to look away.

you willowed no longer, i took leaf to mean wing, and feather to mean ivy. i took a shaded path back
to the armory. it got hot and thick
and i could breathe more heavily,
rapt on high, no mote of hope.

Bree is a poet and visual artist living in Pleasureville, KY. Her Green Panda Press has put out hand-made chapbooks, anthologies and sundry of the very small art and poetry press since 2001. In 2015 she began Least Bittern Books out of Henry County, KY with a focus on poetry paperbacks b…

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