Photograph by Brenda Yamen |
|
SHOES FOR DANCING
By Ann Menebroker Here’s the scene: a protruding slender branch of a tree and a rather large baby bird, wearing blue plastic shoes has its mouth waiting and open. Next to the baby, is a rather diminutive parent with a sausage in her beak, wearing brown leather shoes. The youth’s hunger is large enough to eat the sausage and the parent. Such a wide and open mouth. Such tiny shoes. The baby sitting with its tiny legs on top of a now too small nest. There is, however, no sense of evil, unless the need to eat makes us monsters. The prepared food is nonsense, as are the shoes on the tiny feet of each bird. And the mother and child look nothing alike. But the basic needs are shown without a care or appreciation for our understanding. A mystery to be solved, a laugh to be served up, breaking into dance. BUTCHERBIRD GOES FREE for Billy Jones By Ann Menebroker There was the flute-like sound coming from a wire, this black and white bird in full orchestration — the stadium-sky full of its sound, a citizen of Australia with a curtain call of clouds and blue, stars and space beyond with forever in its memory. The pull of gravity is in a minor key bringing the pitch down but only briefly, before the forever is bound tight as silk ribbon to now, and slips its knot from whatever once held it. DEATH AS THE BULLY By Ann Menebroker George thought when he woke up from death, with the peculiar funeral he had — the odd sort of pope-hat on his quiet head, that there would be the scenes he remembered with an urgent joy — like a documentary of his worth, everyone smiling, no lousy noise, or mean people and that this eternal memory would take him in its arms singing the lullaby he never heard, classical music dancing toward his ears. But I think he built himself up to fail. And the only blessing left for him was this eternal solitude, this total lack of him anywhere.  Ann Menebroker, Photograph by Sandy Thomas Ann Menebroker has been publishing her work since the late 1950s. She was born in Washington D.C. and came to California during the middle of WWII. She has over 20 books and chapbooks to her credit, has had broadsides of her work printed, has been in many anthologies, has edited two of her own lit publications, and in 2010 was included in a college literary anthology titled Literature and Its Writers. Her last chapbook, The Measure of Small Gratitudes, came out in 2011. To this day she wonders why she has been categorized as a “meat” poet. |
Editors' Choice
archive | links
