What Rough Beast | Poem for August 6, 2019

Cheryl Caesar
A tribute to photographers

I don’t do selfies.
The outstretched arms, the long sticks
recall the image

of the damned in hell:
long spoons attached to their hands,
they can’t eat. They starve.

Meanwhile in heaven,
strapped onto the same long spoons,
folks feed each other.

This is what you do.
Open your lens on the beauty
Of your friends. Feed them
on your loving gaze.

Poems by Cheryl Caesar have appeared in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Agony Opera, Cream and Crimson, Total Eclipse, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review, Panoply Winedrunk Sidewalk, Agony Opera, and Prachya, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars, Africa VS North America Vol 2 (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. Caesar holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She lives in East Lansing and teaches writing at Michigan State University.

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