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Contests : Wergle Flomp Free Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2007 : Jennifer Crohn
Ode to an Eighteen Wheeler
Naked-ladied are thy mudflaps
and powerful thy thrust
down pulsing ways and interstates
adorned with diesel dust,
pooty-poo! Pooty poo!
Thy manly chrome, it glitters.
Thy tremulous wheels, they spin.
"Amalgamated Grocers"
says your flank against the wind,
hooty-hoo! Hooty-hoo!
Oh, heaven hath not made thee,
thou art the work of man.
Yet Jesus sits inside your cab
and rambles o'er the land,
Jeezy do! Jeezy do!
What grandeur thine, I envy it:
you're better than a pickup truck.
I'd rather ride around in you
than eat or drink or fight or tuck in my shirt,
tucky-yoo! Tucky-yoo!
Sent as a joke to Poetry.com, this poem was a finalist in the 2007 Wergle Flomp humor poetry contest sponsored by Winning Writers.
About Jennifer Crohn
Jennifer Crohn was born in Mississippi and raised in Texas. At the age of twenty-three she loaded up a small U-Haul and fled eastward, having first wrangled a Bachelor of Fine Arts out of Southern Methodist University. The University of Pennsylvania later bestowed on her a Master of Fine Arts in painting, but no good deed goes unpunished, so upon graduating she became an art reviewer and proceeded to critique her betters from Philadelphia to San Francisco.
In time it dawned on Jennifer that she was not making any money. Computed on an hourly basis, writing newspaper art criticism and smart-assed features turned out to be even less remunerative than modeling nude for sculptors, mud wrestling, or cleaning out locust cages for some sorry entomologist. Making a living as an artist was risibly out of the question, so she wormed her way into the world of editing, in the process discovering the polar universes of academic think tank pontification and cost proposal resubmittals for crash-prone tilt-rotor aircraft. The latter paid well enough that she could dispatch her student loans, whereupon she gave up on full-time work in order to stay home with the first of her two children.
When her scientist husband landed a job in New Jersey, Jennifer and her family moved to South Orange. There they have remained for nearly a decade, during which Jennifer has managed just barely to evade abject housewifery by publishing a short-lived quarterly journal of politics and ideas, working fiendishly for grassroots cabals committed to infusing new blood into local government, and temping as an editor. She still paints and draws occasionally, in between struggling over a small, lumpy body of poetry, reading Saul Bellow and Alan Hollinghurst, and vacuuming up dog hair.
If she were asked to name a favorite poet, it would probably be Yehuda Amichai or Zbigniew Herbert.
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