four poems

by Kathryn Lasseter

Body Parts

Part I:  Autoimmune

I ate my toes

because I was starving.

I ate my fingers to

to stop myself from crying.

I ate my nose

to shut myself up.

So much more of

myself to eat.

Part II:  Stop Fighting!

All the feet in the world

can’t make up for

handless combat,

nub to nub, bloody,

homo neanderthalensis,

unspeakably intimate,

although less bloody

than hand to hand

or bomb to bomb.

Briar Patch

Will I sleep tonight?

That is the question.

This morning,

an alarming clock

volted me back 

to sticky life.

A tar baby ripped

from a thorn patch.

Every night, I edge

my way, finger by toe,

into the briars.

Most nights, brambles

torture my entry. Scratchy

branches snap shut before

I can thrust my dream

body all the way through,

lured by spotty

patches of light.

After a night swaddled in

sweat, I fry up the dirty

diapers with the cinders

from a cigarette I don’t

remember smoking.

On prickless nights,

I dream about weed

smoking and rabbit men,

fall down a smooth-

walled hole, blue-black

until I hit bottom

where I greet teeth

white as Arctic bones,

flashing out at me like

a treed Cheshire cat,

grinning, as if I’m Alice.

Asterisk*

In the element of

                           confusion

I juggle other elements—

             dirt

                       water

    a handful of sky.

In the midst of juggling

I see

       little ray guns sans rays--

vaporizing before

       they can raze

castles of my

                    unmined mind.

Mined minds are fined minds--

     canned goods

                    dropped and

                                       dented

open and 8

*Read the forenotes.

Miss Direction

Linger with pale loiterers or

     rush off with fey followers of

          Krishnamurti or Gurdjieff.

                Swamis, mystics, or charlatans,

                      You can’t go wrong or right.

Never mind petty philosophy.

      Dance with me, stupid.

           My left feet align with your right ones.

                We march into murgatory, eating

                       pomegranate seeds from the tiny

                  hands of Capuchin monkeys.

             Suave doves coo and sway, while

       lily pads float cows from riverbend

  to riverbank.

                                      Hands together now.

                                Let’s ovulate side by side

                          in drowsy serendipity.

Photo of Kathryn Lasseter

BIO: Kathryn Lasseter is a sneaker wave survivor and retired college professor living in Oregon. She has poems in Streetcake, Cypress Review, Buffalo+8, You Might Need to Hear This, and other journals.