by Jenna McClain
It’s sort of silly, don’t you think?
A clown car painted taupe,
a handlebar mustache on a priest.
A surgeon wearing Crocs
and any faith put in a mall cop.
Poetry’s the rubber shoe,
pedal to the floor,
cross hanging from the rear view mirror,
broken taser in the glove box.
You can only go one speed
and no one fits through the doors.
It’s difficult to take any of it seriously.
You see what you read,
and you read what you see,
imagery for the sake of simple complexity.
Dickinson beds the best poet’s wife
and never removes her corset.
Frost’s diverging roads end
at a Costco and a dentist’s office,
the yellow wood shaved down
to make an Ikea side table.
Stanza by stanza,
the economics of diction
overtake a doctorate student’s
linguistic pursuit. They’re running,
but they trip on their oversized soles.
Born and raised in Indiana, Jenna McClain spent most of her younger years staring at cornfields and cranking out works of fiction on the family computer. She holds a BS in Economics from Murray State University. Her work has appeared in JMWW.