Gentilly Precincts, Feliciana
Parish, Circa 2005
To sniff at your girlfriend’s thighs,
Like a horse, neighborly and wise;
And then to invite drowsy secretaries
For a ride in the old MG to the Gulf Coast,
Where sunbathers do not ever feast
On Kesey and Ginsberg; and to top it off
With an unplanned ride to Chicago
On Amtrak, in the middle of the night,
When every word is loaded like liqueur.
You find your aunt is not the claustrophobe
You made her out to be, in the service of
Some notion of Kierkegaard you’re too chicken
To lay out in accessible prose. Malaise,
Sickness, despair, your repeated words
For the unnamable, betray your cogitation
In the service of plain American happiness.
So we welcome you home, lost Percy,
Little lost Percy, far from Stegner’s ranch
And O’Keeffe’s open-ended New Mexico
Miser: we welcome you to Mercer’s
Mercies, for you are our kid on bail.
-Anis Shivani, Columbia Poetry Review, no. 19
For All of Us
Now is a very special time
For you and me because
Nobody wants to eat us.
Everyone else in the kingdom
Has already forgot what we taste like
Or gone Saber-tooth Tiger on this world.
No swooping out of sky
Or undoing the water’s edge –
Our babies lost in tooth and talon.
We fear sharks, the bites
Of exotic snakes; not the radioactivity
We have or will unleash
As mush as the resulting city-stomping monsters.
Now is a special time and nobody want to eat us,
But we are smart so smart and we have our ways.
-Kimiko Ostrozovich, published in Columbia Poetry Review,
no 19
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