Poetry: Selections From Chad Parenteau

Dues

 

Never done.

World’s a

 

half-glass

type. 

 

Holds what

you gave, 

 

misses all

they want.

 

Only slogans

sustain. 

 

Rest take

your giving

 

until your 

out enough

 

to kick away

from view.

 

No time 

for saints

 

who can’t

self care.

Roadkill

 

Intentions

settled,

 

way to 

Hell is lit

 

by friends

who said 

 

you were 

right all along.

No Backsies

 

Your enemy 

didn’t know

she was,

 

left your earth

before you

could scorch.

 

What you would

do to renounce 

own final word.

 

Hurt people

love hurting 

people, always.

 

Sit in soil

sulk with 

salt sack,

 

hurl it at 

first face 

you see.

Ayn Rand Knew a Shitty Poet

 

Took a night off second job

for her friend’s first feature. 

Fifteen minutes, not usual three

they try to stretch into ten. 

 

Then the poet starts to thank

everyone not in attendance,

glosses over her, then realizes

the money is already theirs.

 

Now they can earn it by

doing nothing, read off

chapbook’s numerous blurbs,

throw tangents at absent family. 

 

Next are alleged rhyming poems

Ayn notes how ab should follow

ab in the next verse, not ba, cb

or de, and what the hell is this? 

 

In each member’s polite applause

she hears a suicide pact of selves.

The poet’s straw body she’ll mimic 

in a thousand useless antagonists

 

after they give a smug hug 

of thanks, make her yearn for

a physician’s cold hands

to haul her back into bed 

 

and give a chilled sponge bath,

wipe her down, body a cafeteria

tabletop, never again to trust

any promise of warmth again.

 

 

 

 

 

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston’s Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and The Ugly Monster. He has also been published in anthologies such as French Connections, Sounds of Wind, Reimagine America, and The Vagabond Lunar Collection. His newest collections are All's Well Isn't You and Cant Republic: Erasures and Blackouts. He serves as Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine and co-organizer of the annual Boston Poetry Marathon. He lives in Boston.