Poetry

ands78 photo

By

Antonia Clark

Corridor

I’ve crossed three times,

three times been driven back.

I walk for Juan and for Graciela

I walk for Luis and Alberto,

for Tiger Martinez

and the rest of the dead—

those found, those never

heard of again.

Because of the agents,

I take the corridor, the trail

hardest and hottest.

If you fail, death is neither

quick nor clean. You begin

to see what isn’t there, begin

to melt, and then to cook.

The whites of your eyes

bloom pink, then crimson.

Fewer and fewer of us arrive

but the number of dead

stays the same.

Some have to leave, and some

have to stay. I have to walk

for all of them, for the named

and nameless, for my brothers

and sisters, and for my mother

as I left her, in her thin black dress,

framed in dusty yellow light.

Chicken Soup for the Rest of Us

After Dorothea Lasky

Do you want to drop the chicken

in the soup now?

Do you want to drop the chicken

in all at once or piece by piece

Do you want to drop the chicken

in the soup now

Do you want to pluck it

Do you want to skin it alive

Do you want to cut it up

Do you want to drop the chicken

in the soup now

Do you want to interrogate it first

Do you want to eviscerate it,

watch it run around without its head

There are plenty more chickens

where this chicken came from

Don’t worry about the chickens

There’ll always be chickens

Do you want to drop the chicken

in the soup now. . . . Do you?

Antonia Clark

Antonia Clark works as a medical writer and editor. She has also taught creative writing and co-administers an online poetry forum, The Waters. Her poems have appeared in numerous online journals and she has published a chapbook, Smoke and Mirrors, and a full-length poetry collection, Chameleon Moon.