The Cock and Kettle

The ceiling sags,

water in a sock.

Lift it over the levee and into the next duchy.

Outside the lunchspot, the rooster swings

with brackets to its comb and tail.

It creaks and crows.

The trees go one way, the car another.

Minnowing around, meowing,

carombing in the bathtub down

into the next apartment.

On the mattress, the man swims

printed with ferns.

**

Joyelle McSweeney teaches at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Her first book, The Red Bird, won the Fence Modern Poets Prize and was published in 2002. Her second book, The Commandrine and Other Poems, is forthcoming from Fence in Fall 2004.

Archived at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/mcswj_poems.htm