Here you come again in those fake skins
(the bug-bright ones that hide your flabby meat
but not your horrifying unwebbed feet
and freakish lack of wings or shells or fins)
for yet another season of misdeeds:
you’ll thrash in me while trailing oily ooze,
shriek louder than a blue jay with the blues,
ride funny hollow logs at crazy speeds—
smashing the frogs and turtles in your way—
then climb in slower logs to hoodwink trout
with phony flies before you yank them out
and fling them back to fool another day.
But trust me: sometime when you’re far from shore
and lightning hits, I’ll even up the score.
Melissa Balmain
Melissa Balmain edits Light, a journal of comic poetry, and teaches at the University of Rochester. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Bystander, Lighten Up Online, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, and Rattle. Her poetry collection Walking in on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award) is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.
Also by Melissa Balmain (see all)
- To Mom, in the Beyond - September 22, 2019
- The Lake Speaks to the Summer People - June 9, 2019
More in this issue
