1 Poem by Larissa Shmailo

Father of a Ghost (after Stephen Dedalus)

            James Joyce b. February 2

            Hamnet Shakespeare baptized February 2

Father of a ghost, but from the charnel dead!

Truepenny called, but bid his one son read

A woeful bedtime tale. So list: if Hamnet were

A suicide (the rest, what is the rest?); if Shakespeare were

Behorned by Ann (and her way hath will, clear)

And asked the poor young Hamnet to kill the adulterous peer,

(Perhaps to pour the poison in the porches of his ear?)

Cert, he would read just like a crab, ass backward and in fear:

Hamlet (his twin), ou le Distrait, une Pièce de Père Shakespeare,

Ophelia-like, rosemary clad, made mad with that despair.

Or … if the canon ‘gainst self-slaughter held fast,

Would he be murdered with all murdered at last?

And, scarred by family the most,

Who would rise to be his ghost?

Bionote

Larissa Shmailo's poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in Gargoyle, Barrow Street, Drunken Boat, Fulcrum, The Unbearables Big Book of Sex, Rattapallax, Lungfull!, the Cordite Review; poetry.about.com, BigBridge, MiPoesias, American Translator, Jacket, and over 30 anthologies. Her books of poetry are In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press), and the e-book Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks); her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism, available from iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, CDBaby, and Rhapsody. Her original translation of A. Kruchenych's Victory over the Sun is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She has been a translator for the American Bible Society's Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship's History of Bible Translation series. Larissa blogs at http://larissashmailo.blogspot.com