It Seems Like a Poem Should Smile Wide, with Rotten Teeth 2

← v12n2, Fall 2013

Yes, I’m talking about poetry.

If I had the energy, if I wasn’t bloated,

if I had shoes, if a mouse hadn’t built a home

in the loaf of bread, I’d shout hallelujah.

If my pituitary gland wasn’t a mouse

in the loaf of bread of my brain.

If I hadn’t been tricked into believing

there is a female prostate which brings

pleasure through anal stimulation.

I knew a woman with a rotten smile.

She was what the normals call fat,

part Aztec, her braid all the way down

to her vestigial tail. Hallelujah.

I’m thinking if she smiles wide enough,

the black teeth glinting like the points

of obsidian knives, it would be an event.

humor body class

Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss is Writer-in-Residence at Kalamazoo College. She is the author of the poetry collection It Blows You Hollow (New Issues, 1998). Her poems have been anthologized in Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (2005), Are You Experienced? Baby Boom Poets at Midlife (2003), and Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation (1999), all from the University of Iowa Press. Seuss’s work has recently appeared in The North American Review , Indiana Review , Cimarron Review , and The Georgia Review .