by Lita Kurth
Outside
They listened to your protests at 23 degrees
surrounded by dirty snow
Named them mass talk
a series of mass talks
Mooing and baaing
from your slatted jail
as if someone could hear
Inside
No one gives warning
Or persuasions
But you know
you’re not going to a wedding
Before the dark confrontation
lift your opaque voices
tongues green with silage
Lift your throat
Demand until the roads collapse
the slats break into scrap
and the prisoners
walk immediately
into the cool corn
Lita A. Kurth (MFA Rainier Writers Workshop) teaches Composition and Creative Writing and regularly contributes articles to Tikkundaily.org and reviews publications for TheReviewReview. She has published essays, poems, and short stories in the Santa Clara Review, The Exploratorium Quarterly, Tattoo Highway, and Vermont Literary Review as well as erotica (under a pseudonym) in Cleansheets.com and Oystersandchocolate.com. A story, “Marius Martin, Proletarian” appears in On the Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work (Bottom Dog Press). A work of nonfiction, “Pivot” is forthcoming in the University of Nebraska anthology, Becoming.
_____________________________________________________
