Sandra Feen

Circus Penis

Wedge a circus peanut in her
pencil line cleavage.
Take a picture, trigger purr.
Contemplate his eyes receiving
her lure, taunt, tease
in the montage invading his computer screen.
But he didn’t stage this.

But he did.
He groomed her
long ago, and most people
know he’s the trapeze artist
who loves to lay
low in between performances
of the highest finest polished
precise poetic lines; have fun, explore this

merry go round, try
this primary bench, bench that kaleidoscope
of colors, cozy in, in
win all the seats fancy and plain
along with all the cities of horses
ready to pant, prance for him.

He can’t be exclusive, what with the
candy-coated welcome of each carousel,
yet proclaims he still can be serious
charmed with her hardly-ever-being-saddled
vintage. With love, always promises her
his return, his best cube of sugar
to lick. But she waits, waits,

while competition mocks her
the swan, the unicorn, and that pig
love to tickle her mane,
so she finds her own prop, he’ll surely mark clever,
penis-worthy, breathes up, down, in, out, peak-a-boo-peach.
Then with thumb and forefinger, gently
pulls out, startled by her own farse. Let’s make this real.
One nibble. Swallow. Two. Over.
Whinnies herself back.

Photographer Sandra Feen was inducted as the 2022-2024 Ohio Beat Poet Laureate by the National Beat Poetry Foundation. She was a speaker and workshop facilitator at the 2022 NFSP (National Federation of State Poetry Societies) Convention, Renewal through Poetry, and Literary Cleveland’s 2022 Inkubator Writing Conference. She is the author of Evidence of Starving (Voice Lux Journal 2021) Meat and Bone (Luchador Press 2019), and Fragile Capacities: School Poems (NightBallet Press 2018). Fragile Capacities – nominated for the Ohioana Book Award – highlights her 32-year teaching career in an urban school system. The poem “Palms Monday” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won Heavy Feather Review’s second-annual Zachary Doss Friends in Letters Fellowship, with Rikki Santer, for their poetry collaboration titled, Emotion Bus.