Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired clinical psychologist, German major, Pushcart nominee and occasional photographer, no longer lives for Art, but still thinks about it a lot. “Real Poem” received Honorable Mention in the 2013 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Competition, and “The poem is a space casual” received Honorable Mention in Found Poetry’s 2013 inaugural Dog-Ear Poetry contest. Her poems appear in several anthologies. Kattywompus Press publishes her two chapbooks, Burrowing Song and Eggs Satori (in press). Links to work online: www.cloudslikemountains.blogspot.com

Lives of the Poets, part 2

Karen Greenbaum-Maya

 
A rose is a rose is a rose
Announced Gertrude Stein—what a pose!
            For her garden was tended
            By Alice, who ended
Impoverished, as everyone knows.
 
The alchemist known as James Joyce
Liked to sing, in his thin tenor voice,
            About lyres and cold oceans
            And mythical potions
And maidens who hadn’t much choice.
 
The flâneur suprême, Baudelaire,
Had scraggly and fast-thinning hair.
            He denied it, they say,
            Until Mallarmé
Advised him to grin and go bare.
 
Norman Mailer looked down on John Keats,
And he hadn’t much use for the Beats,
            Nor for Sylvia Plath
            Who’d stirred up his wrath
With Daddy and other such feats.
 
Verlaine hit Rimbaud with a fish.
He’d fetched it for dinner—delish.
            Rimbaud laughed and pointed
            And so was anointed
With scales. Such is lit’rary dish.