POETRY LIKES AN OUT-OF-CONTROL TODDLER
Crossing the street with his mother,
swatting her on the butt
then smacking another lady with a stroller
trying to pull her jeans down,
he runs full speed
around a corner
and is halfway down 7th Street
with his two-year-old legs
while his Park Slope mother,
eerily calm,
says in the most polite voice,
Ethan, come back here,
but he is clearly out of earshot
and perilously close to traffic.
Barbara Tramonte has published a book of poems, Letter to a Friend with the Oyster Couch Blues (1987), and a chapbook Oddities, published in 2018 by Finishing Line Press.
She worked as a professor in the school for graduate studies at SUNY Empire State College for many years, was s a poet-in-the-schools in New York City for a decade, and formerly owned a children’s bookstore in Brooklyn Heights, NY.
Barbara’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Chordata, The Alembic, The Binnacle, Black Buzzard Review, Bluestem, Boston Review, Burningword Literary Journal, California Quarterly, The Chaffin Journal, Common Ground Review, Confluence, Crack the Spine, Dos Passos Review, Drunk Monkeys, Edison Literary Review, El Portal, Eleven Eleven, ellipsis…, Evening Street Press, Existere Journal, Folly, Flights, Forge, FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry, Gloom Cupboard, GNU Journal, The Griffin, Hiram Poetry Review, Home Planet News, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Illya’s Honey, Juked, Kaleidoscope, The Literary Nest, Lunaris Magazine, The Main Street Rag, Minetta Review, Monarch Review, New Letters, The Old Red Kimono, The Paragon Journal8, Pearl, Perceptions Magazine, Phantasmagoria, The Phoenix Soul, The Pinch, Plainsongs, riverSedge, Rougarou, Sanskrit, Serving House Journal, Slab, Slant: A Journal of Poetry, Slipstream, Soundings East, Spillway, Steam Ticket, The Tower Journal, Tulane Review, Umbrella Factory, Vox Poetica, Westview, and other literary and academic journals.