The June Featured Poet is Norbert Hirshhorn

Please feel free to email Norbert at: bertzpoet@yahoo.com

VAMPIRE BROODING
(based on Only Lovers Left Alive, a film by Jim Jarmusch)

Immortality! But we were careful,
unlike Tithonus who forgot to ask
for perpetual youth, dumb fuck.

We had it all—the sex, the booze,
the wealth, the moves, the nights
to swan about and days to sleep.

Only one thing. We needed blood.
Over the centuries—how old? let’s see,
maybe back to Vlad Dracul—yes,

over the centuries, no problem. Like,
find some rubicund peasant lad and lass
tumbling in the hay or lazing under an oak.

Though it’s gotten harder lately. No joke.
People full of PCBs, DDT, mercury, blech.
You try live a decent life in such a world. So,

we began to score from blood banks—
O-negative, high-grade, the good stuff.
Expensive? Sure, but anything to keep us going. 

Hepatitis B, C, you say? HIV? Oh Christ. 
We have to drink from cows?
Are you mad?

FABLE

A fly falls into a vat of hot broth—chunks
of meat, blisters of fat—and just before dying
says, I’ve eaten, I’ve drunk, I’ve bathed,
I’m ready.

THE MOUSER AND THE HUNK
(based loosely on Aesop’s Fable #76, The House-Ferret and Aphrodite.)

She wasn’t just a good mouser,
she was a great mouser.
A terror for vermin in their lair
who scarcely dared emerge even
at night to scrounge the wee-est mite.
Mouser, you see, always slept
with one eye peeled. 

Cosseted by the farmer’s wife,
her runways the house, barns and field—
but, something was missing: oh,
what, she didn’t quite know.  Maybe
the chase had begun to pall,
the endless vigil and all,
or perhaps…One day, she realized.

Mice, prolific, hung on, persisted;
so when the exterminator from
P. Piper & Sons came to call—
randy, chesty, a regular Brad Pitt—
that was it: Mouser fell in love.

She prayed to Our Holy Lady of Felines,
‘Please change me into an Angelina Jolie.’ 
Our Lady, always keen for fun, 
with nothing else to do, did.
Mouser and Hunk straight away
spilled into the nearest hay rick.

The goddess, a prankish soul, loosed
a rodent amidst the carnal doings.
Mouser, one eye open while
kissing deeply, leapt to the ground,
seized the beastie, crunched it bloody whole.
Hunk’s member retreated to its sac.

And that, dear cats, was that. 

What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh.

Norbert Hirschhorn received a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Vermont College in 1994. His poems have been published in over three dozen journals, and four full collections: A Cracked River, Slow Dancer Press, London, 1999; Mourning in the Presence of a Corpse, Dar al-Jadeed, Lebanon, 2008; Monastery of the Moon, Dar al-Jadeed, Lebanon, 2012; To Sing Away the Darkest Days, Holland Park Press, London 2013.

Please feel free to visit Norbert’s website HERE