Picaroon Poetry - Issue #6 - January 2017
This issue has quite the mix of voices, from adorably sinister to tenderly brutal, deadly serious to charmingly irreverent, and everything in between. Featuring work by Peycho Kanev, Karen Little, Stephen Nelson, Mike Jewett, Belinda Rimmer, Lizzie Holden, Darren C. Demaree, Wren Tuatha, Uma Dwivedi, Mark J. Mitchell, Chris Hardy, Seth Jani, Elizabeth Gibson, Harry Gallagher, Bobbie Sparrow, Stephen Daniels, Kitty Coles, Gareth Writer-Davies, Michael Albright, Richard King Perkins II, Tonya Eberhard, Ann Howells, James Bell, Paul Vaughan, Larry O. Dean, Shadwell Smith, and Rex Davies.
This issue has quite the mix of voices, from adorably sinister to tenderly brutal, deadly serious to charmingly irreverent, and everything in between.
Featuring work by Peycho Kanev, Karen Little, Stephen Nelson, Mike Jewett, Belinda Rimmer, Lizzie Holden, Darren C. Demaree, Wren Tuatha, Uma Dwivedi, Mark J. Mitchell, Chris Hardy, Seth Jani, Elizabeth Gibson, Harry Gallagher, Bobbie Sparrow, Stephen Daniels, Kitty Coles, Gareth Writer-Davies, Michael Albright, Richard King Perkins II, Tonya Eberhard, Ann Howells, James Bell, Paul Vaughan, Larry O. Dean, Shadwell Smith, and Rex Davies.
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Reflections of a Pop-Art Madonna<br />
Ann Howells<br />
I don’t remember my mother’s face<br />
just taut, bloodless lips,<br />
as she recited Shalt Nots,<br />
dressed in bath or closet,<br />
unable to bare breasts to her daughter.<br />
The 60s caught us unaware.<br />
I stumbled, blind, from her Eucharist box,<br />
burned my bra, knelt and took The Pill.<br />
Later, I wrapped my daughter<br />
in motherhood’s voluminous apron,<br />
taught her sex was neither totem nor taboo.<br />
Yet, she named herself Immaculate Conception.<br />
Left me wobbling on a pedestal –<br />
pop-art Madonna swaddled in fluorescent light,<br />
gold wedding band my halo.<br />
She wrinkled her nose,<br />
sounds, she said, filtered from my bedroom.<br />
Embarrassing. Unseemly.<br />
She tucked me back in Mother’s Eucharist box,<br />
and though she professed no religion,<br />
it reeked of frankincense and myrrh.
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