Slaminatrix

by Lisa Martinovic´

I have long been a person who’s brimming with great advice for, well, pretty much everybody. I dispensed it freely and without the least bit of provocation.  It never occurred to me that having something of value to share did not constitute license to do so uninvited.

Over the years, the person who’s endured the lion’s share of my fabulous advice is my mother. Despite this, and to her eternal credit, we are blessed to have a very close relationship; we communicate honestly and do the hard work of processing through our rough patches.

A few years ago my mother

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by Lisa Martinovic

Sound effects by Kyle Kellams

Clearly
she didn’t want to be there
fielding tourists at the Visitor Information Center
Siloam Springs, Arkansas

Boredom dripped out
in her sighs
and fingers grazing tired
across a map
here a river, there a lake
everywhere a good time

Miss Arkansas Information at last became
inexplicably animated as I neared the exit:
Tourism is very important to Arkansas
It’s the number two, uh …
Industry?
Why yes, right after poe’try

I perked clean out of my interstate daze
Nobody told me poetry was big business in Arkansas
Poetry? I repeated, incredulous
Oh my, yes! she puffed
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by Lisa Martinovic

Bobo Canelli wasn’t cut out to be a hit man. But that alone didn’t explain his presence on a cattle car lurching across Siberia.

He slapped a fat mosquito feeding on his forearm. “Damn Russkie bugs!”

The other passengers ignored him and continued dozing in the hypnotic heat of summer on the plains.

Bobo wondered if he’d made a mistake, uprooting his life in the Bronx, and selling everything for a one-way ticket to Vladivostok where Annabelle Marsh had vowed to meet him for an unforgettable first date.

This was Bobo’s first stab at Internet dating.

When he told Mama Canelli of his

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One congressman is hung in effigy; swastikas spray-painted on the office door of another. And outside community venues where President Obama is speaking, people roam the streets with six shooters and AK-47s. All this in response to the notion that the government has a role to play in ensuring that every American has adequate health care.

Town Hall meetings to discuss health care reform. It sounded like such a good idea; so, well, democratic. Sadly, many of these well-intentioned gatherings are being disrupted by the few who seem bent on scaring the many—and stopping debate in its tracks.

The intimidation tactics are

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OK, so you’re in this new writer’s group

for years you’ve been avoiding them
like a plague of phone solicitors at dinnertime
but all your friends are going
and if you don’t get with it
before long they’ll all have Pulitzers
while you’re enjoying life as a jingle writer for local used car commercials

OK, so you’re at this new writer’s group
even though you fear them with the fear of the damned
because you’re so utterly naked
you and your purported art
and being thus exposed
there’s a sporting chance you’ll be revealed—instantly!
to have all the creative talent of a

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