Tilt-a-Whirl

A Poetry Sporadical of Repeating Forms

Agenda

i. of the mafia

When you feel the anger singe,
revenge
can’t satisfy. Its destiny
should be
expiation put on hold,
planned cold
and then doled
out in the gratification
of deliberate retaliation.
Revenge should be planned cold.


ii. of the police

While you plan to kill,
we will
do our best to
arrest you
before worst comes to worst.
First,
we’ll find out where you lurk.
Then we’ll circle you and bluff you
till we intercept and cuff you.
We will arrest you first!

Lois Elaine Heckman grew up in Los Angeles, receiving a degree in Italian from UCLA. She now lives in Milan, Italy, where she was a volunteer nurse and first aid instructor for the Italian Red Cross. Among her past and forthcoming publication credits are Boston Literary Magazine, Persimmon Tree, Prole, The Sonnet Scroll, and the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She won the 2010 New England Shakespeare Festival’s Rubber Ducky Sonnet Contest and, in 2012, placed in both the Poetry on the Lake Competition, short poem category, and the Hungry Hill Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Out of Nowhere (White Violet Press), is to be published in 2013.