Saturday, April 11, 2020

Two poems by Karen Chamisso


I. Unnamed
Found-and-pound her little mut me
Found-and-pound we all become
Found-and-pound was she
Tubed up so that the broken drum
Of her lung could still functi
Myself the one whacked out without conjunction
I woke with her bad breath in my mouth
After her death everything went South
For a long while.

II. Pastoral, maybe
My poem fell into the wrong crowd
as I was visiting the  Garden Center
in my SUV with  and Jake, our gardener, driving.
Huh huh huh
To buy me a magnolia stellata sapling or a loud
Japanese plum  - huh huh huh
It peered instead at the bottles of Ortho Orthene on the shelf
“kills the queen and destroys the mound” it read to itself
And suddenly it knew that it had taken a side
Huh huh huh
When Troy was destroyed with every kind of  -cide
Hum hum hum
So don’t think a flower, carefully etched, can save you
From returning to the mound with some kind of bait
And thus I pushed my cart through the Garden Center gate.

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