This Is a Fucking Poem

By Catherine Wagner Catherine Wagner

don’t expect too much.

Well I expect you to go into the

fucking human tunnel

I’m going.

pink grimy glossed

entabulature, welted

and tattooed. Enfolded in

ropy ceiling-hangings

but it isn’t a room,

and bumblingly sliding

out, little legs of

a little girl, bum on the wall/opening

pink legs sticking out like a

hermit crab’s, she’s coming!

shudder out the little-girl

legs with a little

girl head mostly eyes, no ears,

bug brain, aimless

Send her to school

It’s cold, and where should she

go, she will eat her

legs with her mandibles

her eyes will retract inside.

Stroke her riding hood

Settle down, little

nobody will hurtcha

by breaking off your little legs,

six little legs,

if you come.

Source: My New Job (Fence Books, 2009)

Biography

Catherine Wagner’s collections of poems include Nervous Device (2012), My New Job (2009), Macular Hole (2004), Miss America (2001); and a dozen chapbooks, including Imitating (Leafe Press, 2004). She has performed widely in the U.S., England and Ireland; her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Abraham Lincoln, Lana Turner, New American Writing, 1913, How2, Cambridge Literary Review, Soft Targets, Action, Yes, and other . . .