Two Poems by Jenna Le

Erratum

I am a primate,
at once pirate and umpire,
lawbreaker and lawgiver both. 

I am at once
a pauper and a generous tipper,
at once mature and a pupa. 

I hide counterfeit money
in my heart’s right atrium
and love letters in my armpit. 

Last night, I repented my sins,
thinking of the Rapture.
Then I binged on tempura. 

I am irate and a Muppet.
I am a tramp and pure.
I am an upreared rapier and a trap. 

Impart to me all the knowledge in your primer.
Impute to me all the vices you deny.

Woodcut

A man of prelatic mien,
a simple chaplet on his brow,
is depicted pouring a pitcher onto a plate.
Only his threadbare robe
is patchier than his balding pate.

About his sandaled feet gather
the paretic, the cleft-lipped,
the sallow sufferers of hepatic disease,
their postures plicate
or prostrate. The prophet offers to these

his blood-thinning philters,
his thebaics and theriacs of cure.
No blither from this pulpit, just the true article:
to their last particle,
his medicinals are pure.

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the international membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, and Manatee Lagoon (forthcoming from Acre Books, 2022). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch. A daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she has a B.A. in math and an M.D., and works as a physician in New York City.