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Our poet this week is 16-year-old Devon Regina
DeSalva of Los Angeles, who says she wrote this poem to get back at her
mother, only to find that her mother loved the poem.
Snip Your Hair
I’ll snip your hair Cut it all off until you look like a man I will replace your weight loss bars with bars to
make you gain I will cut your credit cards in half I will shrink all your clothes Every trick in the book I will try I will give all your shoes to the dog I will do it all Crazy is where you will be driven Off a cliff you will want to jump Then when I am all done I will look at you with big doughy eyes And I will say I am sorry But I have my fingers crossed
Reprinted from Untangled:
Stories & Poems from the Women & Girls of WriteGirl (WriteGirl Publishers, 2006). Poem copyright © 2006
by WriteGirl Publishers and used by permission. American Life in Poetry is
made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org),
publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
farmerpoem #1
(from a letter to Jacqueline Jackson
from her father, 1948)
the pigs I am told are
doing very well there
is lively
competition
among them as to who
is to go to the state fair
they
are doing so well
in fact that only a very
few young boars had
to
submit to that major
operation which condemns
them to a life of
tranquil
gluttony and an eventual
trip to milwaukee
© Jacqueline Jackson 2007
This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2007.
