Monday, April 06, 2009


In celebration of National Poetry Month
members of the bookstore facebook group, Ravenswood Books!,
have been invited to submit a poem for posting here!
They all have to be at least this good to get published.


HARD BOILED LOVE BY THE LAKE

Her eyes were like razor-sharp 
ninja knives. 
They ripped open 
my chest
 
and dumped my heart, my lungs, my liver, 
and my poor pulsating prostate
 
onto the baking hot Chicago sidewalk 
where the pile of guts
 
lay steaming in the sun
 
and I stood there trying to suck my breath 
through a two foot slice of bleeding meat. 

Jim Mall

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Misplaced


I fear I have misplaced myself
for good this time. The She I was
has not been found curled sleeping at her mother’s
feet, nor stuck inside the white-brick schoolhouse where
I’d guessed we might have parted ways. I retraced
rutted paths and couldn’t find
my self of breadcrumbs dropped between
the years. When last I caught a foolish melancholy
crinkled near the corner of an eye
it wasn’t here in mine. I checked at each time crossroads,
and may have been found once
(or many summer onces)
at my small sister’s shoulder, mired in the sticky street
where crushed and sour, mulberry blood splashed up
our heels like bruises. But I am nowhere fast—
“to lose oneself” a warning after all and not advice
for girls who think they’re young, or pretend sometimes to be.
It’s more a matter now of finding
not where I was but why I’ve been delayed
and with whom I have stopped along the way.


--Hope Rehak
(Janis' friend from the wedding drive)