Bad Cookies

Do you have any idea what lightning would do
to a cookie?

Suspected of adultery in early Mesopotamia,
you and your lover would be tied and tossed into the river.
Only the guilty sank. One more excuse for the cookie.

Red balloons on a white mailbox and mother wagging a finger from the station wagon’s window, never more than two at a time.

There were seven different words for cookie in ancient Egypt--
none for virgin.

My cousin draws her cookies with arms
and legs. She is a doctor.

Who wouldn’t want a cookie on an elevator?

Cookies in the kitchen. They fall often, roll across the yellow linoleum under the lip
of the dish-washer. You have to get on your knees to reach them. Cookies love that.

Frogs in the night-pond chirp Krishna. Oh, Krishna.
you are Cookie Monster blue.

The God of swing-sets
is all for cookies.

Aragoto—actor of ancient kabuki.
One tough cookie.

If you eat cookies in bed
you sleep in sand.

Cookies have extravagant attachments to old chairs and wet teeth.

A cookie can’t pray.
It waits for the refrigerator
to kick on. It chants: milk,
milk, milk, milk.

Lindsay Walker is a graduate from The Center for Writers and pretty much the bomb.

Poetry