Four poems
Robert Earl Stewart
Big Bad Bannock
When the tornado hit the flour mill> the product moved like a quickened ghost and fell into the churning campside lake, which, thanks to severed gas lines and lightning was an inferno of toppled pines on a bed of flaming badminton rackets, deck chairs and dog-eared mass-market fiction. Oh cooling rains, why can’t you be butter?
Praying Mantis Bake Sale
What is the weirdest thing? they ask. Honey is the weirdest thing. Who decided we were going to eat honey, saw it dripping hexagonal viscous golden and said: We shall eat what the bees made. Who was that maniac who said: Let’s consume what the insects make; let’s spread their incubation medium on our toast; put it in pots for kings in their tombs; withhold it from babies, for it is a deadly poison. Comb the fields in late summer alert for the baked goods of the praying mantis. They are silky good, and oh so tempting that time of year.
Cento for a Rat-Packer
Bob Hope, the wisecracking street-corner thug— I feel you very close to me. Moments later, the skipper of the schooner ascended and made his entrance like lavish origami animals returned. In her modesty she ordered the cobalt dragon placed by some expensive chocolate like a number after a long, baffling math equation. We were back on our terrace sipping wine, so there’s no confession about the experience: I took the silence and snapped it.
Uncle: Forsaken translated from “Een jongen” by F. L. Bastet At the concert —there was wild hair like the musicals once set in February. The night harem drove through, their songs rang in the cribs of babies. Across the park an uncle cried out loud. He was suffering. His fountain was kaput, and he said he’d never write music again so help him Satan’s hands. Why had music forsaken him? What horror had he forced on these slaves that they wished him never to have been born? Wait. There in the water— is that his favourite hat?
