Reiser Perkins lives with a husband and some goats on a volcanic island in the Pacific. It is from this rocky outcropping that she runs the independent publishing operation known as Otis Nebula. For many years, she owned and operated a dance studio in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Pushcart nominated poems, fictions, and other ephemera have appeared in Hobart, Sugar House Review, New West, Zocaló Public Square, Busk, Zone, and elsewhere. As a journalist, she's worked for newspapers and magazines in places like Cairo, Egypt and Santa Cruz, California, as well as in her home town of Salt Lake City, Utah.
More information at www.reiserperkins.com .
Western Medicine
1
1
You are dust and to dust will be returning,
a drunken goat in strange pasture.
Best to believe anything twice, the dream
of a triple life, the cure at Carlsbad.
How sexy is your diastema? How deviate
the septum? Do you take a pill everyday
to fool the thing that reacts for no reason?
If your right hand is stronger than the left,
take one half teaspoon cream of tartar
with wine of Cardui
but all you ever did was open your mouth
so the spirits could fly in and out.
For a long time you didn’t even have
the confidence to fry an egg.
2
Instead of giving them to a nocturnal fairy,
Egyptians throw their teeth at the sun.
Make like that. All pried open,
do a swamp dance. You are no gent
or any kind of hero. You come out
from under a rock once a year
and do raps on the table.
It makes me think a ghost is here,
its thought all orb and obstacle.
O rube, do you see me?
O rube, do you hear me? O joule,
is it you that does what must be done
so the world may stay created?
Nine by nine, I’d bet my wife on it.