Detroiters,

Welcome to our September lit section. Here, we bring you two poems by Lea Jeffire, a truly dynamic writer with a surely dynamic set of experiences she’d like to share with us.

To be a part of thedetroiter.com’s lit section, see our Call for Submissions here. (All subs and questions can be sent to litsub@thedetroiter.com).

Thank you & happy reading.

David Bartone
Poetry & Fiction Editor

Detroit, Michigan
March 16th, 2007

Stale piss the dry lawn
On all fours trying to undo
Six months of Michigan winter

Buck hoof tilled the good plot
Eluding nickel-plated Monday
Up north in her breastbones

Like a goat she ate at everyone’s
Blessings and pardons and shit south
Thursday’s County Jail beans and rice

Right on the wrist frost snapped
The missed mitten and tipped
The yellow grass wire with spring snow

When will she give us a year for growing…
Morning after and rhythm methods glove
Nothing more than what she’s made us

Her moons cold and dark off
Lake Michigan where there’s
No room for new water

Gated Community

My double life in a double cell
In a double entendre trading cruel reason
For sad guilt.
I am bending my ear towards heaven
For the slightest sounds
Of breathing.
I am locked in cell 7B2 with an angel
Who addresses me with names I don’t know
And I mostly call her Bitch.
Save yourself or get hip to sitting
And let me eat those wings or
Stuff my shirt for a pillow.
Dante, did you walk this place
Or have poor Virgil carry your sorry load?
I would pimp you both into junk sick
Children and spill in your mouth
The vomit of six years liquor and bad luck.
A cup of water is spit in a forest fire
And a deck of cards is just
A piss on a pile of blown shits.
You die here a hundred times before the
Fluorescents serve up breakfast.

Lea Jeffire is unemployed, and a functionally stilted product of the Michigan Department of Community Corrections. Her writing is the result of alcoholism and a great love of confessional poets like Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Philip Levine.