Pamela Spiro Wagner Poems

First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
...

Cool as Christmas
plump as a wish
and simon-pure as cotton
...

At first it seemed a good idea not to
move a muscle, to resist without
resistance. I stood still and stiller. Soon
I was the stillest object in that room.
...

Black ice. An accident's chain-
reaction crumples 28 cars one by one.
Forgetting the latest advisory
you steer into our skid
...

He says:
I was always more important than you thought
with your cutting me down to size quarrel
about just who I thought I was. I thought I was
...

Off the corridor plumed with oxygen
the blue incandescent symmetry of your tiger
burns blue behind every door,
consumes and is consumed
...

I dreamed my mother cut off
my baby toes, the suturing so perfect
she left no gangrene, no scars, just a fine line
of invisible thread and four toes on each foot
...

it goes with the territory - end
of the millennium, end of the world.
Criswell promises a black rainbow,
a perfect symbol against thinking we will live
...

After Tyrone, the little boy next door,
makes her eat a handful of dirt
for telling lies
about where babies come from,
...

An absurd delusion, perhaps, but
I maintain she always loved me
even as her dagger pierced my chest
and I felt my breath go black and tight.
...