Sherry Chandler

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam etc. All you Monty Python fans can supply the rest of the lyrics and I apologize for even bringing it up (sick pun intended), but I was goaded by…

Donna’s link of the day, the Potted Meat Museum, characterized as “the world’s largest & most diverse canned meat collection.” I’m not sure what to make of the Kerry-Edwards T-shirt for dogs.

Anyway, browsing around on the museum web, wondering whether I could swipe a pic of SPAM without violating seven kinds of copyright law, I also found a link to the SPAM Haiku (or Spam-ku) archive (at MIT, no less). So that makes it poetry related and kosher for this page. You will also find Spam sonnets (Sponnets), Spam limericks (or Spamericks) and other nonsense apparently hosted by John Y. N. Cho, Ph.D.

A random Spamku by John Mitchell for your Friday reading pleasure:

Perfection uncanned
Like a beautiful redhead
Fresh from her trailer

Cathryn Essinger has graciously allowed me to share the poem below, which originally appeared in The New Zoo Poetry Review. Cathryn is the author of two poetry collections, A Desk in the Elephant House (Texas Tech University Press, 1998), winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Award, and My Dog Does Not Read Plato (Main Street Rag, 2004).

Koan in Black and White

On Groundhog’s Day, I set our fat black cat
out in the snow to ask her if she sees
her own shadow.

Her flat yellow stare tells me all I need to know
about cats and snow and the inevitability
of spring.

I decide to take her picture, hoping to capture
that petulant glare, but she blinks just as
the shutter clicks

and my photo is nothing more than a silhouette,
neither front nor back, of a little black buddha
meditating

in a snowy field. But when I show the picture
to my husband, he who doesn’t believe in
superstitions,

he who owns no lucky anything, all he can ask
is “Are we out of color film?” which I think
proves

some point, and which he says, pointing to
the absence of the cat’s plump shadow,
proves nothing.