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Mary McLaughlin Slechta has a chapbook called Buried Bones (2004, FootHills) and has a book due out this fall, Wreckage On a Watery Moon.  An associate editor of The Comstock Review, she also teaches and lives in Syracuse, New York.

Mary McLaughlin Slechta 

Song of a Goat 

My lips flopped.
My eyelids drooped.
My hair, more straw than silk,
pointed as far east as west. 

In a field of painted ponies,
I was the goat.
When I tried to tap my toes
and prance,
a riot started. 

The angels forgave me. 

I shook what little mane I had
and they placed a garland
around my neck
as full and sweet as the others. 

I ate the flowers.

 
Chocolate Baby  

I was a chocolate baby
and white children who’d never seen one
wanted to pull me from the shopping cart.
My mother heard them wondering
if the round belly under my shirt
weren’t a chocolate-covered cherry.
She heard them licking their chops
and cold-stared them 
back to their mothers.

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