The Poem of the Month for August 2022, selected by 2022 Anthology Editors, Veronica and David Cookson, is Anorexic Sexy by Inez Marrasso. The commended poems for August are For the Common Waspish Good by Cary Hamlyn and Paper Boat by Jules Leigh Koch.
Anorexic Sexy
Inez Marrasso
Hunched over a coffee table, turning pages.
I want to be framed like these girls in magazines:
sexy long hair, picture perfect waist.
I want to turn my face into a sonnet:
eyes, for the sun, white teeth, rose cheeks.
I want to weigh forty-one kilos, sport an overt ribcage,
dressed in Victorian lace. The will of a mad anchoress,
weighs every gram, counts every drop.
I want a famine gap between my thighs.
I want hunger wrung from my eyes
my limbs to fit within a Bell Jar
to feel what I feel without food.
I want to make vain beauty my simple mission…
To leave my body, to sadistic perfection.
Keep my secret without detection
– no one loves a fat girl.
I want to go hungry for money,
a doll with an empty stomach.
To be Anorexic sexy, full lips and tits.
I want to be checked out,
frozen emotions, a concrete stare.
I want talking hair and fuck me eyes.
A monster morphed into a commodity.
I want attention for my size,
somewhere for my true self to hide.
Because beneath all this,
beauty’s a sick trick,
and love impossible to find.
For the Common Waspish Good
Cary Hamlyn
The dung-arse wasps are back
frantic breeding like lunatics.
Before you know it there’s a colony
crawling over a honeycomb nest
flinging their wings over their shoulders
in diva-like petulance.
Each summer they crowd my fascias
regrouping around their Queen
like obsequious suitors
writing poems competing
for her well-worn proboscis.
I guess you could call it gang-rape.
I let them stay. So furtive in
their industry so busily brown
scary and threatening
yet so endearing
the way they’re willing to
sacrifice their lives so readily
for the common waspish good.
Paper Boat
Jules Leigh Koch
we sit opposite each other
in a paper boat
our words folded up inside
each of us wearing a life jacket
with a whistle
we drop our oars into destinations
only half remembered
the winds are unshaken
gull sounds sharpen the silence
we drift through the lostness of days
past the cut glass of stars
while we float
into worlds real or imagined
beneath a sun
that has evaporated the truth between us