frequents an area thousands of miles
from its generally accepted habitat
feeds on slave wages, & crystalline
grasp of the worth of each individual
is sick of growing between rocks
wants to articulate and flex carapace
numb with apparent survival
or to hop about the lawn pecking
bird-witted, on sissy little brother
arthritic serious and bristling candle
Brazil (Mato Grosso)
Jonathan Skinner, “Arthrocereus Spinosissimus” from Political Cactus Poems. Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Skinner. Reprinted by permission of Palm Press.
Source:
Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005)
An editor and ecocritic, Jonathan Skinner was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He earned a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2005. His collection of poems, Political Cactus Poems (2005), was printed by Palm Press using an ecologically responsible printing process.
In Rain Taxi Review of Books, reviewer Francis Raven described the poems in Political Cactus Poems as “firmly rooted in our current . . .
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Poems by Jonathan Skinner