Lauren Slaughter
Love This Country Like a Dog
half out the Ford
window sinking
lower in joy round
every sharp curve
tongue flag lolling
snout wet prepped
for buckets of grease
out yonder back of
fried meat joints for miles
it’s a beautiful day
for each glorious asshole
smelling under cover
of jeans strapped with
freedom to shoot who
/whatever a whole
glaring sea of them
crosses on cheap gold chains
green nooses round necks
of each mother could
-be if her body was still
hers oh pastures oh plains
oh mine of your crotch
ripe for my nosing
this violence don’t
blame us tail waggers
condemn the masters.
The Queen’s Hologram
To celebrate the Queen of the United Kingdom’s seventy years on the throne, a 290-year-old gold carriage was paraded down the crowd filled London streets. Inside the carriage, instead of the Queen, was a hologram of her from 1953 waving at her coronation.
Behold, here comes the queen
who isn’t perched inside
her golden carriage, coiffed translucent
head topped by a see-through crown
waving from the past
exalted as a girl can be glazed, pleasant, smiling
at a street lined with dumb
pedestrians stilled by the inevitable
projection. Imagine today’s version
behind a curtain of gauze peering
as you’ve cringed, perhaps, at those awful
prom night photos—teased hair,
horsey smile, stuffed inside
the brocade that ghosts you—
no pockets, no room at all
in that skirt to stow a match.
Mirror check. There you are,
in the flesh, one who’s learned
to take up space—light, ignite it, burst and
Beauty, blare!
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, is author of the poetry collections, Spectacle (2022) and a lesson in smallness (2015). She is an associate professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is also Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women..