Thursday 5 February 2015

3 Poems by Erika Lutzner

Cambodia 

Sold for five dollars; given drugs to make them jump like monkeys in a cage— the foreigners are turned on by this; go crazy for it. Girls as young as five run up to the men on the streets and say; Mister, want some yum yum? They have sleep in their eyes and don’t understand. Mister, want some yum yum? I will not think of my father, who married a Cambodian woman. Mister, want some yum yum? I will not think of him. Mister, want some yum yum? I jump like a monkey.

[Appeared in failbetter


Blackness Slips Through Sundays 

A mirror cannot speak truth

Just as a woman’s face masks
a madness
The man in the mug shot
Could be anyone’s husband, friend, father, —
The woman hides behind
fiction

[Appeared in failbetter


Chanilla: “Nights with Her Father” 

she wanted to scream
out, wanted to bite like
a wild animal

she was small,
he held her down like she
was made of gossamer

yet, she felt like her body
was full of tar

[Appeared in Tygerburning Journal

Bionote

Erika Lutzner’s first chapbook, Invisible Girls, is available through dancing girl press as is her second, Bedtime Stories. Her next book, You Were My Death, is out with Kattywompus Press. She has two books coming out in 2015, one with Calypso Editions, and another with dancing girl press. Erika curates Upstairs At Erika’s, a monthly writers salon in Brooklyn, New York. She also runs Scapegoat Review, a quarterly journal.

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