by Samantha Neugebauer

"Thisbe" circa 1900. Detroit Photographic Company. Library of Congress.

Man-Men

Her vestibule of memory,
is the slippery port of call,
where the doberman bark against
the proselytized metallic salts
and sing the failure of Hart’s Line to
entice the

frank breeched man–
short coated and noble–
who cripples the pearly wide
butterfly of her female pelvis,
yet fails to deaden the sobbing
lips which whimper to her midwives
Please Make the boy turn.

Inside her head,
black and lean with pry bar voices,
the dogs echo their woman handler’s command
Come Come Come
but the message’s gooseneck design,
always finishes in the birthplace painfully.

And it is the same as Gaia,
who created both
her equal
and the sickle who gelded him,
her vestibule of memory is both
producer and consumer,
rabid and loyal,
wimpling without prayer,
as the self-inventions turn to a
Bedlam where the woman
pretends in fetal position while waiting for the
man to dock the dogs.

—

Misconception of the Oyster

The edible kind is not flashy
it has no pearls.
Instead it is rough,
unbalanced.

Brackish split-level,
calcified gated,
no one knows who is really home,
inside me is a man and a woman.

You can have both,
Proteus, stand still and consume,
as when you swallowed the drunk sea
and came after me.

Your mermen are taut with nacre tails,
whispering for you to adore them,
but I am the fertile world,
hiking up my skirt,
let me capture and
charm you to
sweet adaptation.

—

Samantha Neugebauer is a writer living in New York City and is currently completing a BA at New York University. She is a recipient of the 2008 Carlozzi Family Writing Award and Scholarship. Recently, her poetry has appeared in TeenInk and West 4th Street Review. In the past, she has written for the New York Women in Communications Inc. nextBlog, the Washington Square News at NYU, and performed at the Bowery Poetry Club. In addition, she is an Assistant Prose Editor of NYU’s West 10th literary magazine. She is interested in literature, academia, and the power of place. She maintains a blog at: http://misconceptionoftheoyster.wordpress.com/