Two Poems - Jennifer L. Knox

Fake Acid Wrote This Poem

about how you can’t kiss the sky

except when you’re riding a million-

dollar wheelchair, wind in your catheter,

taking out cholesterol zombies with a million-

dollar pupil-scan activated zombie machete.

You gotta let it warm up (while you’re waiting—

I don’t know—flip over to Ultimate Glacier

Bating on Boom TV (it’s like face of a statue

collapsing when they tumble into the sea, the sun

drawing up like a turtle, retracting its branches, sea-

lions running like blubbery hell from it) then upload

the fall to the cloud). The battery lasts about

as long as the manic life of a mayfly.

The 2015 NCAA Women's Bowling Championship

“Pillow Talk is on,

and we are watching it.

If you don’t like it,

you can go pound sand,” I say,

hurling the hundred-pound mass

of swirly polymer weirdness

across his pu$$y trolling

party line, my purple skirt

barely covering my mighty ass

and by mighty I don’t mean

may I? Mother, I may.

For Thelma Ritter’s highball

tells me so.

biography

The New York Times Book Review wrote that JENNIFER L. KNOX‘s new book, Days of Shame and Failure, “hits, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.” She is the author of four books of poems; her work has appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series as well as The New York Times, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, and Bomb. She was born in Lancaster, California—home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Space Shuttle. She teaches at Iowa State University.