Two Poems by Jenya Doudareva

Single Malt

Upward is where you look to find
Unsatisfying answers to
Somebody else’s dumb questions.

Upward is the most optimal
Direction for throwing shit
To ensure that it hits the fan

And begins to dance mid-air like
Fireworks, while your scotch is getting
Dry, dry, dry: peaty residue

Of a heated argument
That’s gone nowhere way too quickly
And stayed there a little too long.

Peaty residue of a mild
Burning sensation in your throat
Undoubtedly radiating

Upward right into your brain
And outward right into one’s heart,
Distilled and matured enough

To leave a sloppy fingerprint,
Like a distant gamma-ray burst
And its dead, dead, dead afterglow

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 Elephant Anatomy

Google “elephant mourning rituals”:
They are just like us in so many ways,
Wailing and shedding tears and refusing
To leave the decaying corpse to vultures,
Though the narrator prudently notes that
We really shouldn’t be rash to compare
Them to us, who have opposable thumbs.
We really can’t know what’s inside their heads.

Their heads their heads their
pretty little heads

Elephant head is the sum of her trunk,
Which is both an upper lip and a nose
(That happens to look undeniably
Phallic), and her upper incisor teeth –
The tusks – for ivory hunters they are
Inconveniently attached to a large
Mammal, though who would we be if we were
To shy away from every obstacle?

Elephants can be
“left-tusked” or “right-tusked”

Isn’t it quaint that they’re almost like us?
A preference for a tusk indicates
That elephants can be used for labour.
For free. If you are unfamiliar with
The basic concept of cost-benefit
Analysis, I suggest you learn it
Right away and start to use the above
Information for the benefit of

Your human nation
My human nation.

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about the author:

Jenya Doudareva loves precision. That fact has moulded her into an engineer and a poet. This is her second Vending Machine Press appearance. Her poems have also been featured in Clementine Poetry Journal, and her paper on algorithms for safe irradiation of brain tumours is available in an operations research journal somewhere. Jenya works in healthcare and is an editor for Weird Canada, a blog that celebrates DIY and grassroots Canadian art. She welcomes the robot apocalypse. Some of her work can be found here.