Ceci n'est pas une pipe
–rene magritte

(this is not a pipe)
***

if has
urgency
that almost
never sees
gradually
bring
the ember in
let it
singe evenly
the leaves
color & quality
is set
by the sun
but spice
& suppleness
is a trick
of the lips

***

I’m checking the hell out of those sandwiches

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how dare you roll your eyes at me
a killer is known by his pomposity
don’t you ever watch TV
all balls out. being a backseat
driver from the front seat
I came home late yesterday
to find my boxer at play
with the ouija board again
I swear he’s fixing to cast
a hex on me and somehow, I suspect
you’re behind this

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consumed by feud

the weasel & the rat duke
it out down the middle post
modernist splat what poetry is—is
a dead weasel & rat
didn’t see the 2010
Volkswagen round the bend

Patricia Connolly studied poetry at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned an MFA. Currently, she lives and works in Chicago, where she teaches sociology and literature for a community college. In 2021, her chapbook Yeats’s Teahouse will be released as the first Permutations multimedia 3D poetry chapbook at Michigan State Press. Her book the night glass received an honorable mention in Coconut Poetry’s 2012 Joanna Cargill Book Prize. Some of her other work has appeared in Deluge, Birds Piled Loosely, The Rain Party and Disaster, YesPoetry, Other Rooms Press, and Askew.