Poem for July 25

The End

I wake
from the dream

and a deep voice
has pity on me

says It’s the end
and I get up

and move
to the blue room

where you stare
at the TV

and you’re dead
your face is dead

and I’m dead
as long as I’m in

the room with you
so love becomes

a blue thing
and we shine

*

The End

My mother
and her dead

sister are
watching me

from the end
Come on

flower
they say

and I love
how they call

me flower
so I walk

closer
toward the light

that is them

 

-Emily Kendal Frey, from The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011)

Poem for Wednesday, May 30

Skyhook
Today I lost my mucus plug which
is funny since I’m Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
and did not expect to get pregnant
to begin with. Here are some cool facts you should
probably know before you start sending
my soon-to-be-born son X-mas presents:

My real name is Geraldine Ferraro
and that is the name of the woman who
got me pregnant which means I got myself
pregnant. Get it? It all went down
at the Cleveland Clinic in Dayton, Alaska.

I’m also America’s first face
transplant and grew up in the town where Robert
Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour” takes place.
Hell yeah, I’ve seen where that skunk stuck
her snout in sour cream, so steeped in idealism.

FYI, Edgar Allen Poe wrote an excellent
short story on a case of mistaken
identity where the ego creates
and projects itself onto the basket-
ball court which mirrors the political

arena where Ms. Ferraro spent most
of her formative years. But it’s Schelling’s
concept of “identity” illustrating
the interaction of the individual
with its counterpart man and machine,
deus ex machina, father and son,
that keeps me going back to the game.

Sandra Simonds, from Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State U. Poetry Center, 2012).