Pretty Lard
O mighty
bacon bit, heart-
shaped, as I
feared. I am in
service. I will
elaborate only
if you buy me
soap. Pretty
everyone,
bystanders
of loving
kindness: drool
me not. If I
masturbated
in the car wash,
it would be for
one lard, and
one lard only—
a mass intact,
removed from
the studio audience,
a novel passenger.
I’m not
embarrassed, just
tidy. This time,
standing in line
has a laugh track.
Same joke about
the heart and
a tampon.
Everything is live
television, especially
the dogs. It is so
pretty when you’ve
laughed and exited,
when you hold the lard
up to the sun that
comes back. It’s so
pretty in the dog’s
mouth. So pretty,
so captured, in
your mouth, just
rolling, one lard
only, and the dog
is licking your
fingers, your face,
and it was so funny
to stand in line
and hear it again
as the audience
believed it like
a bark, like a sudden
and simultaneous
sound at the back
of our throats.
Compliments, really,
to the chef.
Rotten Landing
Fable me this:
the rock is
in the sky,
comfortable
in the wishing
hour when I
open my
curtains and
aspire to be
half-full,
alive during
the moon landing.
Surely the moon
needs a moon?
Like a honey.
“Good God!”
How I would
have fed a fish.
How I would
have changed
the pillow cases.
Awake and not
yet pointing it out.
Then, a flag and
a dust mote.
We don’t sit
down for the
myth anymore.
I will be born,
surely I would
have been
born, orbiting my
repetition.
It’s too late
for memory,
although I, too,
thought the night
was flat,
beyond even
young touch.
Fable it rotten,
on camera, where
we cannot live, and
bring it down, like
a story I felt
later when I was
old enough to
consider my
career, where
I would land, and
if I should kneel.
biography
JEN FRANTZ is a college dropout from Ohio. Her poems have been published in Prelude, Afternoon Visitor, and Sporklet, and are forthcoming in Washington Square Review. She will be attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall.