Men Who Eat Ringforts
are the same as men who eat
my actions with their dead eyed
stares and flippant rolling mouths
at the edges of the universe
where the centuries unroll into
and out of my womb with only
lip service about my skills
at flattening a plan written
across a map on the top of a table
filled with pens and the drippings
of mustaches that have to be
swept aside to make way for
the world that is unrolling into
and out of the symbols that shift
even though they were once hard
data connected by synapses
and theories about how to win
against kings and their kingmakers
who are daily inventing new methods
to tally, grind, wax and wane
even if only on the head of a pin
where angels dance without sense
or vision simply to entertain
those who would place a heavy
creased thumb on their crowns
Take one, Take Two, Take Three
1:
I want to know my own face
in each of the rooms.
Already faces there, looking
like someone no one imagined,
like no one’s idea of a good time,
or a strike won, or a line
that grabs you by the throat,
or even a just a slow swing
in a hammock in the breeze.
Birds hanging around
singing the kinds of songs
that birds sing, cake
with funfetti sprinkles,
and lithographs of the original
anti-fascist man in a cap.
All the chairs are already taken
and a chorus of high school
girls starts whispering.
It’s probably time to sit down,
but some witch not exactly
hiding casts a spell
less about knowing than feeling
ones way through a room.
2:
I want to know each of the rooms.
Looking like someone,
like no one’s idea of a strike won,
or birds hanging around in the breeze.
I want to be the original lithograph
of the anti-fascist man in a cap,
funfetti sprinkles,
a chorus of high school girls.
It’s probably time to cast a spell
less about knowing than feeling
ones way through a room.
3:
I want to know
someone,
a chorus of girls,
a strike won,
birds hanging around in the breeze.
To be the original
anti-fascist man in a cap,
funfetti sprinkles,
a way through a room.
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Dawn Tefft’s poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Fence, and Witness. Her chapbooks include Fist (Dancing Girl Press) and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark). She earned a PhD in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, volunteers as an editor for Packingtown Review, and lives and works in Chicago.