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Selected
Poems
PROPERTY
Ronald Wardall
THE
21ST CENTURY BLOOMS
Karl Gluck
AND
DANCED ALL THE MODERN DANCES
Erica Carter
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ISSUE
NUMBER FOUR
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ISSUE
NUMBER FIVE
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ISSUE
NUMBER SEVEN
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ISSUE
NUMBER EIGHT
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ISSUE NUMBER NINE
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HAVING
A BANKRUPTCY
is like having an unwanted child.
You go away to the country
to grow big, hoping that
no one will know you’re not married,
the new girl in town.
You breathe in the fresh country air
for your financial health, a new start.
You have introductions to Daniel Defoe
and Fydor Dostoevsky, your favorite writers,
and a room of your own because, after all,
it’s because of your writing that you are here.
But the bills follow you causing Morning Sickness,
in which you throw up in the bathroom
each day as soon as you open your eyes
and stew in your own black vomit. The smell is putrid.
Soon the telephone is ringing
even though you have a new number
with a shower of different voices from the City
informing you that unless you pay NOW,
it will be a still birth. The bill collectors are like the hissing
snakes in Dante’s Inferno ( Seventh Circle of Hell),
coiling themselves about you
in a living choke hold, binding your hands behind your back,
and you can’t escape those calls
whose wires run directly into the center of your
being, your womb. They are a cancer on your soul.
You wonder why the connection is still so good
here in Newark, New Jersey, the end of the world.
But the phone never stops ringing.
The bills arrive daily, each a hydra
with nine heads leering with menace,
and you can’t cut those heads off.
As soon as you pay one bill, another pops up in its place.
You struggle valiantly, but there’s nothing you can do.
Soon it’s lying-in time, and you are flat on your back
without a nurse or any friends,
legs spread far apart to welcome this Minotaur
you would like to flush down the toilet,
as the bills emerge in a flurry from your vagina,
screaming wild birds in a river of blood,
your new child,
already disinherited and facing death.
Margaret Barbour Gilbert |
