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FIRST ATHENIANS by Patrick Fadely

July 1, 2011 Contributed By: Patrick Fadely

Don’t talk to Christopher Nelms
He’s hatching an egg in his mouth
And if he speaks
He might drop it

Or if he didn’t drop it
The words might penetrate the egg
And the bird emerge all weird
With a face in its hand and an eye in its ear.

Don’t talk to J. Matherly
He’s hiding immigrants in his gums
And under his tongue
And in the ragged hole left by his wisdom teeth

And if he speaks he might turn them to bullets
To shoot you straight through your curdled heart!

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 4 Summer 2011

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2011

Further Reading

as above (of course) so below
by Emma Eisler

This poem was nominated for The Best of the Net. foxtail flower, cunning loveliness, leave me to eat until i’m full, fill up on bitterness. before it is our house it is – to me – one basement, a roving plane of parties where i drink to stomachache. i don’t know now if i ever […]

Beautiful Teeth by Brett Strickland

I used to have beautiful teeth, though only my brother remembers. But one morning when the light was sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel I woke to blood in the bed, and the remains of my first child spilling like wine from my body. After showering, I pulled away the blankets and stripped the sheets to […]

The Death of Z
by Thomas Jacobs

The Nobel laureate Zoroaster Zigsari was gunned down outside a tapas restaurant on Calle Cava de San Miguel on the eve of his seventy-sixth birthday. There was no question who was responsible. He was one of the regime’s fiercest critics. He had become, he told me, inured to their constant threats of death. Twenty years […]

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