Katy Lederer
Issue 14 · Fall 2014
1.
Like
metaphor: two components brought together.
Egg: coin
Sperm: sun
We pay good money
for this son.
Egg: mountain
Sperm: universe
Diverse,
the largeness of our hurt.
Egg: wood
Sperm: would
A pun,
a pun baby.
Egg: tears
Sperm: rain
A simile as
baby,
like
a baby.
Sun and simile.
Dried up.
2.
We like
to smile and simile.
Red, just
that rosaceous,
quick
and quickened.
Quick is just
a word for life.
Quicken like
clay thickening
toward some dark, hardened
way of life.
What if we just
made statues? Just
that cooling and that
thickening?
Here we are in culture,
cinched, injected,
rescued,
rescuing.
3.
Never fields of study, only
knowledge growing on the vine.
Egg: accrual.
Sperm: grapes.
We ape and ape,
Then drink our wine.
Egg: never
Sperm: shape
One is entered,
One will enter, fine.
Egg: martyr
Sperm: martyr
Refused
to take another form.
Egg: confusion
Sperm: order.
We have been ordering our children,
we have ordered them to pause.
We like to hold them in
our jaws.
4.
We release the lonely women from their tears,
we tear their hearts and ears
like
a terror.
Our trained physicians will release us now,
the children like
the hounds of hell, pursuing us
relentlessly from bed.
5.
Egg: fir
Sperm: snow
Settling.
It is beautiful.
Egg: box
Sperm: bow
Tied up
like
the present
or tubes.
6.
The children parse us.
The children make us as
their marks.
How they do it with their eyes shut tight, like
magic.
Hands balled up, legs loose, their heads now stacked like
bowling balls.
Never could the sample then require… What?
Something…
happiness?
Something like
a happiness or sadness.
7.
There on the table
spread eagle.
Never again will we lie.
But we lie.
Egg: happenstance
Sperm: happenstance
Never again will we cry.
But we cry similarly.