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Raggedy Andy by Derek Pollard

October 1, 2012 Contributed By: Derek Pollard

Today is like Denmark
A fingerprint dragged across the mirror
Fine silt drifting through the afternoon air

Who is Iginla? What does Lem mean?

I catch the lid of the saucepan
As it slides onto the stove
The ruddy circles of the electric burners
Ruddier when splashed with Tabasco
Ruddier still the night I opened
My finger hanging an under–the–counter
Stereo beneath cupboards sagging
With the weight of twenty–five years

This year is grey, glutted with rain

When someone yells Faggot
What do you do? Again, and again,
And again, what do you do? Today,
We shake our heads in exhaustion
And disbelief, wondering whether
It will be drugs or simply the strain
Of such senseless stupidity
That finally unseats our neighbor
The one whose brother kept yelling
The other day like it was Nazi Germany
And no mistakes could be made
To keep the trains running
(On time or not, does history
Bear out that it mattered?)

If you use non–boiled India ink
To give yourself a tattoo, what happens?
Does drinking your own urine actually
Cure fever and chill? Do such things
Even matter when you are only given
Two quick choices—either to talk
To your own shorn skull at the side
Of a grave or to take up house
With Dick Cheney?

Return to table of contents for Issue 6 Fall 2012

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: October 1, 2012

Further Reading

Tia Marilena’s Rainbow Eggs
by Xenia Lane

This story was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Fiction Prize. There’s been a crisis of eggs. Tia Mari’s eggs, to be exact. I call them the rainbow eggs due to their astonishing, colored patterns. She’s collected them all her life. Her nickname, Marihuevo, was inspired by her obsession. Tio Javi is trying […]

Chianti
by Nancy P. Davenport

I found that bottle of chianti in the cabinet for cooking it’s nothing special— kind of cheap, actually I’ve spent the hour, the day, the week minutes ignoring that it’s in there seconds but here it is in front of me, the cork pushed in with the end of a knife because I threw away […]

Perfume
by Charles Kell

Last summer your skin tasted of orange peel, of ephemeral    lies buried deep in your lungs. Never more than two words: that hurts,   or like that, right there. Every- thing inside me became unlocked,   the Stanley knife you stole that looked as though it could barely break flesh,   the love letters […]

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