Michele Stepto
Scenes from the Poem and the News 1
The poem enters
wearing galoshes
The audience wonders
is it raining?
No, it isn’t raining
but the people are saying
let the teeth of the poor
rot in their jaws
they are too shiftless
to have good teeth
let them drop out
and give them to us
or let them move on
to where there are dentists
and give us their land
give us their land
But why the galoshes?
the audience still wonders
The poem exits
galoshes flapping
I need them it calls back
to wade through this shit
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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