Thursday, January 7, 2010

Catherine Zickgraf - One Poem

How I Spent August

My enemy: boredom.
Nineteen-year-old
boys entertain me.
I surround myself
with the jobless,
we lob insults round
the table, smack each
others’ backs, back
into each other in the
driveway. I’m the
queen of lost boys.
They worship me.
I’ll inter them with
tucked condolences,
when they’ve lucked
out in the system,
arrestees I played
Mother to, who
listened to very few
words of my advice.


Catherine Zickgraf is indebted to myspace for helping her find her long-lost son whom she placed for adoption two decades ago—thus you can find her blog there: myspace.com/czickgraf. Her poetry has appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank and decomP.

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