Baker

Save me a piece of marchpane…
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

How can I not think of Marzipan
when popping this Lorazepam?

The weather’s horrid, and my ear
wants a stormy sonic relation.

It’s like a man trying to track down
a sister who was given up,

decades previously, for adoption.
Dearest sibilance lives in Dublin…

I came to Iowa for a job;
my mother should come as Job.

The state I’m in some obnoxiously
call “I Oughta Went Around” it—oxen

pull that wooden joke. Mother yang
in Boston is dying, slowly dying.

A snob, she refused to live with me 
in the heartland, though a man

often beat us together.
“Get the hell off of her!”

I screamed at twelve—her bloody teeth
in my hand. The

state I’m in some call “Idiots
Out Walking Around.” I’d 

ride the cemetery’s Black Angel
were it not for the present gale.

Her twisted, metal wings
strike me and I wince.

The moment rises like the smell of manure:
farmer’s field, hospital gown. Rue

Everything—
my beloved street!—

but the sound of a tractor finding spring.
Turns out M & L share a benzine ring.

They’re chemically related;
they’re mother-son belated.

These little, white pills?
Just pastries in a bottle.

Ralph James Savarese | Wand
Contents | Mudlark No. 82 (2025)