Two Poems
Insurgent Country
after Jesus Camp
Freeway billboard children
stick antenna tongues out
Air’s poised
sound on grass
What praise? sang the
microphone headset
Pious ashen depots—
their ache in tune
to somelips’ want
for giant camera rolling
Drunken hills, child actors
dead marbles
& brownbagged
privacy of home-script
America so vast and
usable
Ways of Seeing
Ladies with obvious
bobby pins & names
on gold chains.
Old Millie &
her quick-draw
coupon clippers.
Old men kissing
at the barber shops.
Bunny Rutherford,
my finest affectation.
The priest calls it
a children’s homily
so as not to offend
his parishioners
with a plainly
drawn moral.
Perspective tells me
that the hooked
lamppost is
scolding its
offspring lamppost.
You watched me
like a boy watches
his invalid step-
mother, arriving
at her sickroom
with a tray of tonics.
When I see people
from high school
I usually greet them
by their last names
as if we had been
teammates together.
Becca Klaver is a founding editor of Switchback Books, a PhD candidate in Literatures in English at Rutgers University, and the author of the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009). Her first full-length collection of poetry, Los Angeles Liminal, is forthcoming from Kore Press.
