C. Shawn Brown

Guppies

I use to call them guppies,
but I know they weren't really guppies,
they were black mollies,
and as their mother dislodged them
from her inner sanctuary,
she swam about the tank,
swallowing her babies--
but only the defective ones, I told myself.

Now, I imagine you there,
spread upon the cold, sterile table,
a mother-guppy, grunting
her primeval guppy-grunt,
dislodging her third guppy
from her own sanctuary
of fluid-filled sack, not aware
of the arrested development
that has already set in,
and then finding it,
a horribly lovely sight.
You might have been contemplating
whether to devour it whole--
to return it to the body of its body--
or, to let it swim alone.
You didn't devour it.
Perhaps you should have:
in a sanguinary fit of hunger
and love, perhaps you should have
reabsorbed your birth-defect guppy
back into you, I tell myself.


Last Days of Najibullah

Sometimes the dogs hear the jets before they arrive overhead,
so you get the dogs barking, the dogs yammering,
every dog in Kabul protesting the violence that approaches.

Then come the shockwaves of bomb blasts rubbing the windows,
some like red droplets whipped from a wand,
others floating up like orange bubbles and bursting into smoky flares.

The Hotel Inter-Continental looks out on everything from a central height,
half of it wrecked by shelling but half still serving clients,
just now, I'm the only guest at the Inter-Continental
walking very softly in the halls.

C. Shawn Brown served five years in the U.S. Army then earned a BA in English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He has been writing poetry and short stories for six years. He's been published in Jump! magazine, and is now a student at The Portfolio Center in Atlanta for copywriting.