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This article was published 12/4/2016 (2276 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
National Poetry Month: Marika Prokosh reads Pearls before Swine
Pearls before Swine
The sins of my family have been well-documented:
gluttony, covetousness, child-trafficking,
and refusing to ask for directions
have gained the most notoriety. Which was always
the plan. We knew everyone would believe
the entitled foolishness of teenage girls, an old man's
weak and selfish acts. And me,
the sacrificing virgin in blue, rotting away
in a French backwater for 16 years, out of books
I hadn't read six times and men
who didn't pass their Fridays in a trough
of beer and piss. I was more
Eve than Madonna. I wanted the library,
the grounds, the strange hairy prince. I wanted
the rose, its thorns between my knuckles.
I volunteered to lie down with danger and hold it
in my dainty hands, learning how
far I could push it, teaching it
who was king around here now.
Marika Prokosh is a Winnipeg writer. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, CV2, Lemon Hound, Poetry Is Dead, and The Toast.
The Winnipeg Free Press will be running poems by Manitoba poets every weekday in April to celebrate National Poetry Month. The NPM in the WFP Project was edited by Ariel Gordon.