"Always be a poet."

              -Charles Baudlaire

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PIKE POETS

Seth Berg

Seth Berg graduated with his MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State Univeristy in 2003 and has been bouncing around the country teaching collegiately ever since (with an occasional stint as a bartender here and there.) His poetry can be found in Connecticut Review, Chiron Review, Lake Effect, JMWW, BlazeVOX, Stitches, and forthcoming in Dark Sky Magazine. Some tasty fiction can be found at Word Riot. Berg lives with his sexy (his words, not Pike's!) photographer wife, Ashley and their stinky English Bulldog, Bob, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Here Macgyver, You Figure It Out

 You’ve got a fistful of whiskers

and some ozone…

a shoe string,

some merriment,

and an echo.

At some point,

the whiskers are maniacal,

(before the typical dog, before the inebriation.)

At some point,

(after the wind incident)

you are damp, walking.

Upon arriving at a swamp,

you give us cat tails,

their heads ultra-bulging,

their sway perpetual.

It smells like green here.

It smells like wet.

In a meditation slightly

above your head,

two swamp birds collude,

spin gravel in their beaks.

This is how one learns to listen,

listen, you say to yourself.

Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory

On my belly, slithering

down a wooden staircase,

gravity begins to concern me.

I study the uncarpeted floor

at the bottom, decide where

my skull will make impact,

what it will sound like when it hits:

a bongo drum, a blown tire,

a weary nomadic foot.

These are not my decisions to make,

neither is the behavior of physics,

the ellipse tugging my torso

into angular thumping submission…

So I continue my grainy descent;

splintered and choiceless,

I realize two stark facts:

the staircase is beginning to lengthen;

I can not slither backwards.