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      November 8, 2023Always Tender in the Wrong PlacesLaura Ruby

      after Audre Lorde

      I.
       
      Two bears and an owl walk into a bar—
      the beginning of a joke, maybe,
      or a dream.
       
       
      II.
       
      Say the bar is not a bar but a hospital. The bears,
      —one brown, one white—linger over a carcass
      on the operating table. The grizzly claws away
      the breasts, the polar bear stitches up the wounds.
       
       
      III.
       
      The owl puts the carcass on a rotisserie, roasts
      it over a fire. The carcass must be cooked
      before it is done, low and slow, till the meat
      is charred on the outside, pink all the way
      through.
       
       
      IV.
       
      This will take weeks.
       
       
      V.
       
      Sometimes, the carcass weeps. When the carcass
      weeps, the owl spits up a pellet of fur and bones.
       
      Look, clicks the owl. It could be worse.
       
       
      VI.
       
      It is.
       
       
      VII.
       
      A year later, in another hospital room, the carcass
      waits. Polar bears aren’t much for formalities,
      but it’s still a surprise when he whips aside the
      curtain, whips aside the gown. He scrawls all over
      the no-longer-breasts breasts, gnashing yellow teeth
      in black gums. The meat is like rubber, he growls.
      There are no leaves on these trees, no blooms on
      the flowers, no give in the hide.
       
       
      VIII.
       
      The bear says: this isn’t reconstruction
      but resurrection, grr grr.
       
       
      IX.
       
      The carcass has forgotten its own language,
      speaks in grunts and clicks. It wants to kiss
      the lethal beak of the owl, lay its bald head
      in the mouth of the grizzly. Take the paw
      of the polar bear, smooth the spiky fist flat.
      Pluck the marker from his claws, draw them
      huge and primeval on the curve of a cave
      wall, restore them all to the wild ones
      they once were.

      from #81 - Fall 2023

      Laura Ruby

      Prompt: “I wrote this poem in response to Rick Barton’s ‘hermit crab poem’ prompt suggested by another poet in my workshop. According to Barton, the ‘hermit crab’ is a type of poem in which one finds another type of writing—a recipe, a field guide, lab reports, etc.—and uses the form to ‘contain’ your own poetic material. I chose to write a poem in the shape of a list.”

      “The good thing about poetry is that subjects are everywhere. The bad thing about poetry is that subjects are everywhere; how do you catch a poem before it flies away without you? I find that writing to prompts helps me focus when I’m overwhelmed, when I’m having trouble sorting out what I think, when I’ve been circling and circling a subject but haven’t been able to capture any particular truth about it. Sometimes just challenging myself with a prompt—write a poem from the most incredible newspaper headline you can find!—can shake me out of a slump. Sometimes, the prompt has to come from someone else, someone who is better able than I to see what I’ve been missing.”

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