poetry on mamazine:

To Alecia at Four Weeks
by Joan A. Monheit

For Sasha on Her Fifteenth Birthday
by Joan A. Monheit

Dark Side
by DeAnna Jones

The shadow
by DeAnna Jones

Toughen Up
by Robin Mullery

track two (night dream)
by Judy Halebsky

On the Coast
by Judy Halebsky

Home Schooling
by Elsie Whitlow Feliz

Dream World
by Madeline Sharples

Black Bomber
by Madeline Sharples


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POETRY

The Influence of Peers
by Judith Baumel

I don't want to hear that kind of language in this house
Try shoot shucks sugar
sheleileigh Shalala,
anything but the vowel
which hits the iffy one
and comes too close.
I'm an idiot has taken over,
though not for long.
I've ceded ground on butt,
the lost tuchas, tush, tushy
having had the double virtues of ethnic
reminder and gentle enjoyment
of the soft yielding place
from which I wiped with care
that which I wish to hear
called only by cuteness, or evoked.
Well, what could he do,
my muscular ball of opposition,
that whirl of destruction,
wielding Hrunting,
tossing chairs and books
and punching out the wind
behind him screaming
beep you beep you beep you beep.

Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator. She is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University and a former director of the Poetry Society of America. Her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers (Wesleyan University Press, 1988) for which she won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and Now (University of Miami Press, 1996)