from: "Amazon" Ann Pedone

Unavoidably

the men with their

humble crotches

A house inside out. Or

are they ten?

Fucking against

gravity, I’ve never had much

of an affinity for lakes, fine

museums or very small scrotums

Always colluding, always

worshiping too many depressions

I am having shingles

I am pissing all over a dead man’s mattress

I am eating three eggs on white toast

Then my many bodies prologue

Who will be here to inseminate me tomorrow?

“You are always God damn

eroticizing the present tense”

Technically, I’m a hysteric

“Hotel robe”

“There’s no poetry to

be had here unless it’s physical!”

“Thumb in my mouth”

“Hot on the case

of a missing baby”

The birds, she explains, are

language. Finger them

According to my source

how a woman carries

 the small bit of flesh

lodged between vagina

& anus

is a sign of her weathers

hickory stick

the last bit of fruit

jam left in the jar

Or, in other words

there have always been men who

have a long, messy history of

biting down too hard on cheap

supermarket dates

Ann is the author of The Medea Notebooks (Etruscan Press), and The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53), as well as numerous chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in Posit, Texas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, the Dialogist, Barrow Street, 2River, Tupelo Quarterly, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. Ann has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared as Best American Poetry’s “Pick of the Week”. She graduated from Bard College with a degree in English Literature, and has a Master’s in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley.