Elaine Mintzer
Elaine Mintzer has published most recently in Anacapa Review and Sheila-Na-Gig. Her work has been featured on Moontide Press poet-of-the-month page, Cultural Weekly, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Beloit Poetry Review, Panoplyzine, Slipstream Press, Silver Birch Press, Gyroscope Review, Last Call, Chinaski, and Lummox. Elaine’s first collection was Natural Selections (Bombshelter Press 2005).
The Yeti’s Lament
They call me abominable,
but I’m not that bad–
just too hot.
Every year I snowshoe
to cooler latitudes.
Every day the foot I plant
in the permafrost sinks.
Soon alligators seeking new swamps
will snap at my heels.
Menopause was a piece of ice
compared to this.
Part of me wants to give up.
To embrace the last freeze
and sink below the polar cap.
I long for another ice age.
An eon of snows
too heavy to melt,
layer upon layer
that presses against itself,
against the earth,
moving downward.
And everything blue:
the sky, the sea, the cold, the ice.
Listen to the song
of glaciers calving.
The bellows and cracks
of offspring falling
again and again.
Rippling the seas.
Man, in This Twilight
—after Cecilia Woloch
And if time should take the god out of him—
the sinew, muscle, might
of bone and flash of tooth that first caught me
that afternoon under an oak tree
where we learned to worship one another–
I’d be left with the one I wanted,
his mortal shadow following
the contours of the earth we still share.
