Six Month Check-Up by Constance Stadler

Flashing enameled perfection

in response to my whine

crisply

she lowers the light.



I hear them
honing their Lilliputian weaponry

the sterile cabal

plans a frontal assault --

I soil myself.



The coleus on the window sill

is on its last legs --


I take it personally.


Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the 'prehistoric' epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was formerly an editor for South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. Her most recent work appears in such 'zines as ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. Her chapbook, 'Tinted Steam', will be published in 2009. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.