Sample Poems by Deborah Poe
Demographics
1.
Imagine now how many people are hip to hip, thigh to thigh. In the world, we are tumbling towards the glut. An overflow. Maybe it’s not so funny. What percentage of the factory is producing? What percentage of his orgasm went to the child? What percentage went to love?
Lucky for us, there are the dissatisfied. Let go the nun, the virgin, and the shrew. Overpopulation is an abusive spouse. Earth and its arranged marriage.
2.
Some of the parts miss your whole. Some of the whole hurts to part. Some of the hurt holes up the parts.
3.
Breeders live, breeders die. Stick a needle in my eye.
4.
I can’t stand the way you touch me. A child reaching for its mother.
unwoke
now is not the time to remember
the afternoon in the country
with light lying over bodies
in the cabin, slantwise.
on the fractured land,
the acres gardenless,
bore silence like fruit trees.
stark branches knotted
towards the sky, are unable
to hide desiccated waste
trapped freezing below.
how could one forget
setting the last log on fire—
or waking with
the notion of being alone?
it was like being snowed in by tumbleweeds.
When I Hear Your Name
it reminds me of that pinched nerve
the sky flutters like a dead pigeon
and all the world is speaking creole
while you have one language
on which to rely
don’t lie to me now
I know you heard my name too
it was up there screeching like a dog
telling me your concrete ground
was no home to land on.
The Burning Question
of why the mid-day
tennis shoe sand shuffle
traipses beside the
florescent silk strewn cactus
flower well beyond its prickly
and why the red rock
arches its back
to bend returning to the ground
its erosioned gymnastic
balanced under sun beams
and why the unpeopled plateaus
chant back their green-eyed
I see you seeing me
and lichened to another
are infiltrated by elemental earth.