Raven Poetry: Online Poetry Journal

Meghan Doraty is a recent graduate of the University of Calgary and currently enrolled in the Masters of Arts in Creative Writing program at
the University of British Columbia. She has been published in NôD magazine, The Gauntlet and Inscribed. She was recently awarded the Grant MacEwan Literary Arts Award by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Men in black and white movies

1.  Men in black and white movies
are so much more sensitive

than the men you sit in classes with,
than the thighs of the men

you put your hands on,
than the men who want you to be

apricot and sweet, not
chiral and hydrogen.

2. Men in black and white movies
have voices like gold bricks and rye whiskey.

They sit in leather chairs and smoke
all day long, sipping from politics and religion.

At night, they dance with the girls
who become the women once they are kissed.

3.There he goes, over that hedge,
to collect a bouquet of lilacs for Ginger Rogers.

Leaping over the convertible door
and leaning close his head bowed low,

his lilacs  brush her neck as he adjusts
her cape across her smooth landscape:

Expendable Crewman

I died today
    stepped in front of Captain Kirk
        just as that Klingon Cleric
        leaned into his heavy bladed ‘aqleH
    on the planet Boreth

Later they exchanged my suit of armor
    for business casual
        and put me to work
        in a fluorescent lighted cubicle and
    told me to tack my skin up on this bulletin board.