Lynne Thompson 

After he left, / I took up residence

in a blues procession,
south of the dirty south moon.

The women wore bandannas
and shiny buckles, unfastened.

We ate meals of sautéed musk,
turtle, Prozac, and milk of ____.

In the background, muzak played
Pride & Prejudice: The Game.

Only circles, withdrawn from
drawn water, seemed strange.

The rest—the clear
morning, the witch-grass--

I drank with alacrity.
What I could not drink--

(possession
and the practice cage)--

was no cause for tears. It was
back to yesterday—to reading

Moby-Dick at 30,000 feet—
to things that never happen.
​

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Monarch

He whispered it a few times—naughty—
and it sounded childlike (as if I was still
a child) and sensual until I remembered:
sensual and childlike are forbidden to lay
in such close juxtaposition though I do not
recall who said so. Who was it, after all,

who proclaimed children are innocents when
we have many reasons to know they are not?
Why just today, I saw a shy girl pull a butterfly
from its flight, detach each of its wings & hold
each gossamer bit—and with such ferocious
tenderness—between her eager scarlet lips.




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Lynne Thompson is the author of Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer’s Award. She is the newly-appointed Reviews & Essays Editor for the California journal, Spillway, and recent work has appeared in Apercus Quarterly, Poemleon & Solo Novo.