POEM ABOUT A WEREWOLF THAT I COPIED FROM SHAKESPEARE
The moon—that’s where it starts. Of course,
you can’t begin with birth, something so obvious,
the claws coming out breech, or going back
even earlier, the lycanthropic spermatozoa.
Goddamnit, I’m never going to be able to get
to Finland now, not on scholarship anyway.
To do that, you need to write poems about history
or paintings or, if you’re really good at branding
yourself, the history of painting. People eat that
shit up. Actually, they don’t. We pretend they do.
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RON RIEKKI‘s books include U.P. (Great Michigan Read nominated), The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (chosen by the Library of Michigan as a 2014 Michigan Notable Book), and Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (May 2015, Michigan State University Press).
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Read more by Ron Riekki:
Fiction In Blue Fifth Review
Fiction in Moonshot Magazine
In Verse Wisconsin