Bobbi Dykema

Amateur Night

Perhaps all the atrocities
committed in the theater
before my eyes
are penance
for years spent in an orchestra
playing
every third or seventh note
correctly.

Until I learn to praise
the beauty
of misshapen bodies dancing
out of rhythm,
endure with grace
heroically inept,
incessant tributes to
some minor god
blasphemed through trumpets,
celebrate the braying foghorn
of astringent woodwinds,
cheer gusty-voiced altos
enacting ticklish
violence on gratefully
dead composers—
I shall be compelled
to witness operas admirable
chiefly for the heights
of awfulness they scale.

Listen!
The pores within my skin
are exit wounds
of a billion tiny stars.



In North Dakota, this is what we did for entertainment

I remember skating
being upright
gliding
like fish in a tank
in circles.

Maybe forty kids would gather
in a dusty dance hall
Wednesday nights
and skate to scratchy records.

Pay a dollar at the door

The pop machine so old
it sold glass bottles
for a dime.

We played musical bottles
I won once
I learned to skate slowly enough
to keep a bottle always in my sights.


Bobbi Dykema's work has most recently appeared in The Litchfield Review, ginosko, and at hotmetalpress.net. She is currently at work on a doctorate in Art and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

 Current Issue:
October 2007

Melinda Blount
Frank DeCanio
Bobbi Dykema
Taylor Graham
John Grey
Don Kloss
Alicia Matheny
Pam Pignataro
Jeremy Rich
Bill Roberts
Bethany Rountree
Tom Sheehan
Kelsey Upward

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