poetry on mamazine:

The Influence of Peers
by Judith Baumel

Waiting for the Lost to Come in Dreams
by Judith Baumel

Darklit
by Gwen Hutchinson

Delivery
by David B. McCoy

Distant Mountains
by David B. McCoy

One
by Elizabeth Sullivan

Running, Thinking
by Elizabeth Sullivan

Night Waking
by Elizabeth Sullivan

Once I Did Kiss Her Wetly on the Mouth
by Beth Ann Fennelly

Salvation
by Amber Flora Thomas


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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)