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DAVE LASKOWSKI

Dave Laskowski is a graduate student in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has been recently published in Gam, elimae, and Word/for Word among others.  

 

 

The following poems are from a larger manuscript based on Hamlet.


MISCHIEF IT MEANS

Due grief & impassioned, an eq-
uatorial colossus, star-lit, an an
gora’s shhh, we’re vulnerable
both to paddle & whip, an ab-
sentia’s vulgarity (both should
have & will) in hymnody’s per-
missive cholera -- O, if I were
but sick. That a thought like acid
is virile in its mischievousness.


FOR REASON

Adrift on an ocean of bad munitions --
its whale oil & salt like two bulls
wrestling in a cartilaginous silt --
that he was gone when I needed
him most, a paraffin incarnation
like an insignificant curse that I,
twice, have told my father I was weak,
a perilous madness both bone & bred
to unsex my envy, that I will be
its organ -- to signify the nothing.

 

 

copyright © Dave Laskowski