Credo

The seven plagues of Egypt, especially the frogs,
The seven-day creation, its schedule of flourishing,
All this makes her think I have lost my marbles,
That they spilled out of my head and rolled down
The aisle to the altar of the holy roller church
Which I now attend regularly, still calling myself

A feminist, a leftist, still whispering to myself
That Jesus was a pacifist/separatist, that the frogs
Ribbeting in the Right Wing about his church
Don’t know Him, not in the giggly, flourishing
Way I do. I lean back into the everlasting down
Of the feathers of the secret and heavy-marbled

Dwelling place of the Lord (see Psalm 91, marble
Added for emphasis), and I can watch myself
Vertebra by vertebra untangle, lay it all down,
And the black-turtlenecked, cigarette-toking frogs
She invites to her Soho soirees, not flourishing
So much as slowly climbing into their church

Coffins (the only time they attend any church
being each other’s funerals), hand-carved in marbles
Imported from very sophisticated places. Flourishing
Is passé -- it was okay in the Nineties, with self-
Actualization classes and yoga poses like the frog,
But now? Please! I am bringing the tone down

Of the high-art party. She thinks this is down
Time, that, in my head, a computer glitch church-
Propels me, that once the software is frog-
Purged and debugged, I’ll find all the marbles
She thinks I’ve lost, that I will excuse myself
And laugh, blame it on flashbacks from a flourishing,

Fashionable drug I once took, that my flourishing
Will consist once more of making the wittiest put-down,
Like she still makes, this time about me. I ask myself
If she ever loved me. I think she did, but churched
As she is in the temple of chic, with its hot pink marbles
And after-hour mausolea, embarrassed, she killed it -- a frog

Escaped from an aquarium during her cocktail party -- frog
Legs make fine hors d’oevres, but not a throbbing, flourishing
Amphibian bouncing on her marble flooring! Down
On my knees, I grieve for her, face upturned, at church,
But in being crossed off her guest list, I delight myself.

Anne Babson

Anne Babson won the 2003 Columbia Journal Prize. She was the year 2000 winner of the Working People’s Poetry Prize, and she is the recipient of awards from the Atlanta Review and The Grasslands Review, as well as other journals. Her chapbooks include Uppity Poems, Dictation, and Counterterrorist Poems. Another chapbook, Commute Poems, is slated for publication by Gravity Presses. Her publication credits include The Madison Review, Red Rock Review, English Journal,American Poets and Poetry, The Red Rock Review, The Iconoclast, The Wisconsin Review, Controlled Burn, Bridges, Paris-Atlantic, Windless Orchard, The Peking Duck, and Left Curve. She is the curator of the Holy Trinity Poetry Forum reading series in Manhattan and is the Vice President of Literature of Women’s Studio Center in Long Island City.