The World Is Too Thin to Win a Beauty Pageant by Monika Zobel — eBook

The World Is Too Thin to Win a Beauty Pageant

 
The world, our world is made of paper—
inside, lampshades spill papered light.

On playgrounds bologna sandwiches
are cut with paper scissors. Children

prefer to chew bus tickets over spinach.
When we speak, sentences are billboards

glued with our bare tongues.
Birth certificates—a paper-thin

promise of lifetime warranty.
Death certificates—a recall

on all models that are beyond
repair. Our hearts—paperweights to keep

letters from reaching envelopes.
Lift yours and lick the words.

I will crack them like a squirrel.    

 


Monika Zobel’s poems and translations have been published or are forthcoming in Redivider, DIAGRAM, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mid-American Review, The Adirondack Review, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. A senior editor at The California Journal of Poetics and a former Fulbright grantee, Monika lives in Vienna, Austria.


 

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Monika Zobel
Monika Zobel is the author of a book of poems, An Instrument for Leaving, selected by Dorothea Lasky for the 2013 Slope Editions Book Prize (Slope Editions, 2014). Her poems and translations have appeared in Bayou Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Four Way Review, Redivider, DIAGRAM, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mid-American Review, Drunken Boat, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. She is a Senior Editor at The California Journal of Poetics—an online journal for poetry, criticism, reviews, and interviews—and the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Austria. Monika currently lives in Bremen, Germany.