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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 18: 29 Apr. 2023
Poem: 90 words
By Roseanne Freed

In the Workshop After I Read My Poem Aloud

This isn’t a poem.
It’s a newspaper article,
he said.
Where are the metaphors and similes?
 
My fame is so infamous 
I don’t need metaphors or similes 
to play like a plague. My smile 
is contagious, it lights up the room, 
fires a fever in my victims, 
and as I dance on the lungs 
I simply cancel respiration. 

After months of my successful crusade, 
they’re naming their kids—
Covid, Kovvy, Kovyd, Corona, Ko’rona. 

I’m like a god in a Greek Myth. 

Roseanne Freed
Issue 18 (29 April 2023)

spent more than a decade working in the Gift Store at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, ONE ART, Verse-Virtual, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice, among others. Her work was nominated for Best of the Net 2022.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

The Stranger (23 February 2023) by Roseanne Freed in ONE ART

Where are you from? in Verse-Virtual (July 2022)

Signs read by Rosie on YouTube (25 January 2021)

 
 
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