| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
HUNGER
Tammy Turner Peaden
(The Sharpened Word)
She takes the six-forty
everyday, a real zaftig mama
running register at the Slavic Grill;
slack tits and hair and broad, flat teeth
stick perpetually to cracked lips
like the biting aroma of onions and cabbages
sticks forever to her skin and
it floods the bus in sudden clarity,
passengers think of home, of sweet sausage
for supper and tired wives with tight asses,
angry husbands with hard hands and
nobody knows her name is Zinnia;
sour old maid but somebody’s flower
and no one will guess
she takes the six-forty everyday
on a three-stop ride to see her daddy-man,
fat black butcher who strokes her heavy head,
kisses dry lips slick as they slap needy meat
together until their pores spit vinegar,
until the starving empty tastes onions, cabbages.
SOME CHORES I GOTTA GET TO
Steve Sturdevant
(Blueline Poetry Forum)
Worms got to an edge
of the tomato patch.
I can see their shit,
holes in the leaves.
My son moving to New
York, for Christ’s sake.
At nineteen?
Wants to be a model?
Ten feet of drain gutter
hanging in front of this
window for weeks now,
since the ice storm.
His mother must have
filled his head with
that New York shit.
She’s never been there.
Got half a cord of larch
bucked up out back,
need another cord
before winter hits.
How to tell a nineteen
year old, a kid his age
in New York is sleek
leaf for tomato worms.
Too many plants to pick
bugs off every day.
Guess I’ll have to spray.
Some years, you just have to.
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