Featured Poet:

Beggared Lazarus

They want to soak my mind
                             in formaldehyde.

Those priests, beggared by light,
                         release my soul.

Their drills hollow out tunnels
                           in fleshly walls,

rain down stony dirt,
                          and seal trapped darkness,

and outside, their shovels
                         coat sins with silt.

They cap their ears against
                         my cavity,

sound in me a tin beat:
                         a glossed robot,

who, a second-time dead, would not be bound
                         with grave clothes.  

                                                           But my mind!
That stenching tomb
                                beggared my mind;   they croak:  

under these leaves,
                                seamless, shaded, rest your eyes

from light.   Should you image
                                   upon a written tablet white larva

crawling into an orange womb--
                                we'll drop that beggared monarch

in cleansing, colorless, black-veined
                                winged formaldehyde.

Blind Mouths

Those blind-mouthed pastors squeal like mincing mice.
Afar they sniff stale cheese in wooden traps,
               sidle a tail beyond stinging air guns.
Now they peep out from dark weeds,
               intoning over soft-furred pink bellies
                                                         exploding dust.
               Then snip off their tails, and present them
               rattling to Herod like the
               dancing head on a charger
of John the Baptist.  
                                 His axed stump
Jesus left more than three days entombed,
                                cold, blind, loosened from flesh,
while He sought rest in deserts,
               soaked fish bones in one of Jacob's wells,
               and poured fresh oil upon two disciples' heads.
While Satan watched, he changed five stones to bread.                                     Blessed are the catchers of fish.                                     Blessed are the makers of bread.

Olga Kronmeyer is a native of the Catskill Mountains.   She is the editor of the   2007 Alchemist, an anthology of poems written by the members of the Alchemy Club, a local poetry group based in Grahamsville, N.Y.   She has published a few poems and has taught creative writing classes.