Susan Swartwout is Professor of creative writing and publishing at Southeast Missouri State University and is the Publisher of Southeast Missouri State University Press which produces full-length books, four annual writing contests, The Cape Rock poetry journal, and Big Muddy: Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, an interdisciplinary magazine. Her two collections of poetry are entitled Freaks and Uncommon Ground, she co-edited Real Things: Anthology of Popular Culture in American Poetry, Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita, Balancing on a Bootheel, and A Student’s Guide to Getting Published. Her poems and short stories are published in literary journals such as Nebraska Review, The Laurel Review, River Styx, Negative Capability, Mississippi Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others.

Strange Fruit
--Louisiana 1957 (September 20, 2011. Issue 31.)

I said I'd pay the nickel
if my brother would follow me
into the travelling freak tent
floating fetuses in pickling jars,
set that week in the grocer's parking lot,
Southern gothic-science,
the pre-PC ancestral oddities
like Uncle Miltie on TV
wearing lipstick and a fruit hat. Outside,
posters proclaimed Frog Baby! and Two-headed
Pony! See the Lizerd Boy! Sheep Child:
Two Hands, Three Hoofs! All Gin-yoo-ine!
Inside, our mysteries: Find the gimmick, the stitches,
the ooze—the I-Spy that proves
freak is fake, to laugh at, not to laud.

A staple in the two-headed pony's
neck. A thread at the base of lizard boy's tail
in the jar's gray film of slough and sog.
A fetal pig in upside down hell, waving its
two-tailed shame; the sheep-child hunched
in charade of its country-boy myth,
fifth leg cocked like a pumphandle.
And the frog-mouthed baby stared at nothing,
its lips parted by stillborn vowels.

We didn't expect to see paradise,
unchanged but for human alterations.
Strange fruit, best left unplucked
in their painless world floating
beyond our ken and unkindness,
their miracle saved in heaven's glass dome,
somewhere their souls preserved as bonus,
not parking lot blasphemy but a demo
of some sweet thief in the night, while
my brother and I, silenced by our refusal
to admit any redemption,
returned to our plain world
of change and decay, quotidian
replication, dullwitted DNA.