Rearing Related Verse: Tending a Rhetorical Zoo by KJ Hannah Greenberg

A gal’s got to stay busy sorting words, not playing in realms all cattywonkers,
Since wild anhingas fly beyond constructs’ bonds, toward fresh possibilities, where, they suck
Nuanced supplications or permission to laugh, cry, and express rough country.

Hedgehogs, after all, merely grow bigger when transcripts are set aside at daybreak.
Compromised weekly efforts leave poky critters restless, cause them intermittent palpitations.
It seems when forced to pull against diction’ dinghies, elect small ships set sail,
Bank in opposition to fantastic flotillas’ hundred “first” broadcasts, else raise white flags.

Alternatively, precarious gantries, plus word bridges, fashion all sorts of kowtowing
To editors, proving, like pungent manure, that mentors’ benevolences ought not be forced before
Being charmed into proper devices made acceptable by dint of moving motes’ addresses
Up a notch, down a queue, across a deadline, or scuttling, otherwise scrambling
Directives toward those persons empowered to vote on unpublished widdershins.

Friends may appear sufficiently obsequious to groove our literary gamut. We realize,
After all, our chordophone-like antics make possible the inhalation of excoriating views,
Forming, for our pleasure, verbal cinctures crafted entirely out of qubits of warp plus woof,
Noised over the miles separating well cultivated verse from term-hurling harpies.
Accordingly, dear one, assistant bank managers also deign to opinion rills about enteric fever,
About the preponderance of scree, and about the dangerous passage of truculent students.

Self-identified wisdom, rides high on bushbucks conjured from rodomontades’ rot,
Snacks on recherché gateaus laced pangolins’ bitter, sanguinary approach,
Offers text and texture little chance to limn ideas bright, if not to glorify grassy
Accounts of dribble, leaky drivel, and drone-imitating shelducks.
Likewise, we remain ill-advised to simply offer up prayers for afflicted organs.
Other bits, though, which eliminate waste, corporeal and psychic, an be saved
Via ciphered stanchions of our bodies and intellects, maybe small portions of our souls.

That said, fatuosity, confused with truth, in places where bilge ranks as sacred water,
Deprives “dainty” scribblings of meaning, of magic solutions, of pillul power.
Salacious stuffing rents mentations, fissures illiberal interpretations of man,
Of school, of home, of chancel. Churish nattering exists all bray, no muscle, no
Punctilious rites. They rally miscegenation to proper fiction, levity to verse. Later,
Minions spring forward gasping, invite rictus formed some thousand years hence,
Enjoy actions that leave horses’ best saddles stained with vintage retsinas,
The likes of which cloy not only essays, but jade transnational tolerance, too.

In the few minutes it takes to politely answer phones or emails, to IM,
To help other authors remember calculators, lunch, afterschool appointments,
We can clean our barnyard of misbehaving elephants without the intervention of pregnancy
Hormones, avian revelries, foreign imports for pagination, editors’ whiteout or chalk.
An eye twinkle, among small children, works to indicate which tender portions
Remain intransigent, stuck in anthracite carriages, so many cerise birds buzzing their roofs.
Recall, that if not for the strut of rutting cassowaries, safe under baobab trees,
If only passed over by feathery oubliettes, we sappers, who pitched those fardels,
Would not only keel over, but, also, as we wheezed and trembled, would fail to write.

Photography by KJ Hannah Greenberg

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