THE INTERNET

The kids using the old age filter can’t identify the age the old age filter

makes their faces. Grandma, they say, looking 42.

Let me tell you, selfies have nothing to do with the self.

So many poems try to convince the reader that the woman writing

the poem is sexually attractive. They leave me asking, if beautiful, don’t

you have sufficient opportunity to do that using your physical image?

The hot poets are writing the worst poems imaginable, relying

on a suggestiveness they were handed at birth

and that is divorced from the page. Everyone

seems to be damaged by those poets. The one with the Hitler

Youth high and tight: it’s hard to get through even one of his poems

about inserting his fingers into another person’s orifice. His jawbone

a kind of post-war spate of men returning to the workforce or

fleeing to Argentina.  I never dyed my hair blonde,

personally, except once and then it was really really blonde.

Kill me before I go back there (to my PhD). 

Let me help you rethink what you mean

by ugly. There are so many documentaries absolving the murderers 

of the 1990s of killing their spouses. They are so relieved.

It’s, like, a golden age for murderers. Let me show you to the poet’s

hairdresser. Seeing, as they say, how the sausage gets made. 

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KATIE BERTA’s debut poetry collection, retribution forthcoming (Ohio University Press), won the Hollis Summers Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, The Yale Review, and previously in Southeast Review, among other magazines. She has received residencies from Millay Arts, Ragdale, and The Hambidge Center, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and an Iowa Review Award.

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