Jennifer MacKenzie – Confessional poem

Jennifer MacKenzie

Confessional poem

I’m eating sliced cheese and cucumbers
on a smudgy mattress with no sheets

My nose isn’t patrician yet but lyric still
has dead fish for eyes.  Gleam w/o consequence

in the unnamable country where the lion lets more
of his apples get licked by his sacred lice

Can you find the “secret police” in that line
and seven more tilt-a-whirl tokens

There is always this mechanism skimming language from strife

Licking sweat off his upper lip, the solder ______________.

2

in poems about deer the sea and a beaten child
dreamy accusation running down the cheap middle

of nowhere motels doing Fuck-all, semi-
florid, flagrant Florida orange visitor What

advantage the eye can take
from vagrancy on the in-sweep of

its foamy tide language folded
a long time in the shallows

I mean what we have described, have we extorted