Bathing, Miss Del Greco informed us in health class,
is very important, especially once you become a teenager.
In fact I can smell many of you this very day,

—But who reads that shit? About as true to life as a
   velvet grape.
—I think he judges poetry with his dick. And poets, too.

It's true. I lied. Isn't that how
we stay alive? Dr. Metz in Old Testament
101 said Moses parted the reeds on a lake,

the uncanny ability, a special dance, a mind on safari, 
the scent of blossoms, the foraging flight, the uncanny 
ability, to cling, to find, to fly into a mind on safari,

The first time I saw it, I thought what an ugly specimen. It looked like Grandma’s bathing cap, grown green and small after all these years. I sliced it open and tasted the pale flesh. And gradually she offered herself up leaf by leaf. In her depths she held a tiny, faded star, a spark that fell in the meteor shower over Frank’s garden. 

Nin Andrews’s poem “The Artichoke” appeared in our Fall 1991 issue. Her most recent collection is Why God Is a Woman.
The first time I saw it, I thought what an ugly specimen. It looked like Grandma’s bathing cap, grown green and small after all the…