Seven Deadly Sins
by Lois Marie Harrod
After Hieronymus Bosch
The faces, the mouths
open, the hungry child eats
cookies made from clay,
eats dust as the pregnant woman
swallows what she craves,
and those kidnappers of sorts,
the Baptists from Idaho, who know
what they are doing,
evidently not enough to convict.
Wouldn’t you promise a child
a swimming pool if you could?
Wouldn’t you promise elsewhere
like I wanted to take my mother?
She died so small, a tremor,
a sparrow curled on her sheet.
And what about the dogs
my sister says, how many dogs
are wandering around Port au Prince,
how many dogs wandering New Orleans,
Fukushima, Baghdad, Bangladesh.
When will the dogs from Somalia,
from Syria, find bones to gnaw.
No one has mentioned the dogs.
Lois Marie Harrod’s most recent collection Nightmares of the Minor Poet appears in May, 2016. Her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016, and her 13th and 14th poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State). She is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey.
Comments