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Sean Lause teaches at Rhodes State College in Lima, Ohio. He has published fiction, poetry, and criticism in Mid-American Review, Poetry International, Epicenter, and Mother Earth International, among others. |
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Published Winter 2005
 
Lynndie England is the daughter we always wanted
I saw her once
down on Summit Street
setting stoplights on fire.
Don't get me wrong—
If I saw her now
I’d probably level her
But you don't know her
in her secret veins
and I do.
It wasn't orders,
psychic numbing,
quiet rage, rule by Nobody,
Banality of Evil or
evil of banality...
Nothing is more misunderstood
than this obscenity we call breathing.
And Lynndie England
sits outside her trailer
alone under a tarantula sky,
sucking gold from fireflies
and praying for a tornado
to descend like a witch's hat
and swallow a hole
she used to call a heart.
Because nothing can be whole
ever again, and nothing can be pure enough
or evil enough to feed the hunger
of her hate, because her people
die before they even breathe,
because the starved and lost
of this generation are a monster
waiting to be born.
Aliens float round this earth nights
like Christmas bulbs terrified
of crucifixion
and if Lynndie ever met one,
she'd tip him like a cow,
stick firecrackers up is sad blue ass,
because she wants to, anything goes,
because the impure products of America
seek salvation in insanity.
And besides, don’t hide it—
Lynndie is one mean little fuck.
Life in prison for Lynndie?
She's already there.
She's home. |
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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