Home By Now
by Meg Kearney
Congratulations to Meg Kearney, winner of the 2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in Poetry
A Malcolm McDonald Series Selection
ISBN: 978-1-884800-94-8
paper, 76 pages, $15.95
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LIVING IN THE VOLCANO
All I want is a falafel, a macramé purse,
and First Piccolo in the marching band.
Hey, my sunless tan puts an orange slant
on everything I say. I mean I want to be
first, and hippie free...but my tongue
is a branding iron shaped in an “X”
(I kiss your eyes and you’re dead), First
Trombone turns left at the 40, and
the rest of us wave bye-bye, too grumpy
to follow. We say, let’s practice more, earn
this pride of prima donnas a scholarship
to Party University. We say, let’s melt
down the horns, buy us some brewskies
and vitamin M. We need to forget, for a two-
-day bender, how much we can’t stand
ourselves. But this is high school. And now
Mother, our First Fan, has skipped town
with the bakesale money and Finnegan,
our only tuba. Who needs TV drama? This
is life in the volcano. This is as cold as it gets.
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