blackmail press 25
Janis Freegard
New Zealand

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Janis Freegard is one of three poets featured in AUP New Poets 3  (Auckland University Press, 2008).  Her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, most recently in Poetry NZ, JAAM, six little things, brief and Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand.  She also writes fiction and won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award in 2001.  She lives in Wellington and blogs at http://janisfreegard.wordpress.com
cast down - mephisto jones
Easter Rising (Joseph Plunkett, 1916)

they blindfolded him
our guide explains
for the benefit of the soldiers
(six standing, six kneeling)
so they wouldn’t see his eyes
when they shot him –
a piece of white paper
marking his heart

the day before, he’d married
in Kilmainham Gaol –
the proposal’s on display
You will marry me and no-one else
he’d written to his Grace
I've been a blind fool





Sea-mare

bare-finned and pregnant – that’s how I like my males
a quick one-two with the ovipositor

stuff his brood pouch so full of eggs, he’s fit to split
then it’s off for a temperate frolic with the girls

I may pop back in a few weeks to watch him expel our little ones
out into the coral forest

Way to go, babe
& afterwards have myself a fat cigar

See you next season & I’ll slap his bony rump
he likes that