Michele Stepto
Scenes from the Poem and the News 4
The poem enters carrying
a kettle of fish
in one hand and
in the other a horse
of a different color
It doesn’t get very far
The audience watches
it watches carefully
horse fish fish horse
do these even belong
in the same sentence
let alone the same poem
Meanwhile the poem
is dying up there
it puts down the kettle
center stage
followed by the horse
and exits forlorn
This is the drama
this is the action
very experimental
the audience thinks
Michele Stepto (with her son Gabriel) is the translator of Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World (Beacon Press, 1997), from the original Spanish by Catalina de Erauso. Her work has appeared in Verse-Virtual, Ekphrastic Review, NatureWriting, Mirror Dance, Lacuna Journal, and One Sentence Poems.
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