Come on Home the Poppies Are All Grown Knee-Deep by Now

Marlene Effiwatt

delighted by the absence
of sea-glass cars parked

on our rock lot the whole house
to myself I am dark not
my poems and still no one asked
seems to know what it means to crave
egg yolks

the word “poem” is short for “pomegranate,” 
but I hadn’t thought of that line the first
time I saw you

and the first time I saw you
you sat neck-bent under a spotlight,
the circumference of my skirt’s hem

for a year my sister went by
“megawatt,” our last name is voltage

there is a whole anthology on “Frankenstein’s
Monster: the OG Mulatto”
you can read about his dad, a white man
fascinated with scraps

his dad, he had the chills but I thought
he should just zap the wife already

Marlene Effiwatt was born in 1996. She received her Bachelor of Arts in creative writing at The University of Arizona. She is the recipient of a Writers’ Workshop Provost’s Fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.