I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life./ I want to peek at the back/Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weeds grow. Gwendolyn Brooks ________ James Wren has published four chapbooks: Encounters Abroad, Virtuous Women. . . and Other Circumstances, Anxious Reading, Petroglyphs:A Dictionary of Social Ills. For information on ordering, contact James Wren 412 Argonne Drive, NE Birmingham, AL 35215 or email [email protected]

James Wren A Self-Basting Turkey after twenty-seven years and three children an exponential number of infidelities one dead dog and something like a fistfight my mother packed her bags and left my father to an empty house and his peculiar brand of self-loathing she’d thought of everything in advance down to the minutest of details (three decades had provided ample opportunities for that) a self-basting turkey strategically kept warm in the oven, for example, complete with what would become a secret family recipe for laxative stuffing Alabama, you see, has no alimony and it would be a long time before he’d have a leg to stand on Minotaur Minotaur my hungry bull from that moment when I was felled by your approach, onto your lap I became your constant companion. Upon your massive thighs, climbing passed all else Again, again rising from between two horns I have seen the distant seas On the wind, the brilliant wind, from field to field Together we galloped You reared your proud head My hand whipped through your unruly mane And all night long we embraced in slumber.