Three Poems
FRUITCAKE
My father makes macaroons for a living.
They are a popular product and quite healthy.
The macaroons are named for my sister, Jenny.
“Jennies” they are called. “Jennies Macaroons.”
My father made a “Lisa Fruitcake” once.
Shrink wrapped. In a drab beige box with grey lettering.
Small pieces of shriveled raisins, candied dates. Nuts,
some too hard to chew. It was dry. Fell apart like “sawdust”
one customer wrote, “embarrassed me in front of my guests.”
The Lisa Fruit Cake never made it into to a trade show, or an ad.
Rejected unanimously by the distributors,
the Lisa Fruit Cake was a resounding failure.
ON THE G TRAIN
A woman scratches her inner ear
with a ballpoint pen.
The man next to me is sleeping.
People date for months
before sleeping and grooming together,
yet this guy is bobbing onto my shoulder.
Yesterday a woman clipped her nails.
I see a man with terrible growths
on his face and neck.
Wearing a wedding band.
All people have genitals,
I am nauseous.
A woman with ripped socks and flip flops
opens her tote bag,
resting on the filthy floor.
She could throw up, or have a bomb.
She takes out a book on world peace.
I am not comforted.
SPAM
The website of my poetry school
thinks I am Spam.
Or at least, my IP address.
Not that I really understand what that is.
But I am flagged. Banned.
I do not sell Viagra.
I swear. I am a poet, of sorts,
and I can not get on the poetry school website.
I would be an idiot,
if I did not see the metaphor of this.
~
Lisa Badner has published poems Mudlark, TriQuarterly, Fourteen Hills and forthcoming in The Cape Rock. She lives in Brooklyn, bikes everywhere and has a day job.