Sam Sax
Sam Sax is a queer, jewish, poet & educator. They're the author of Bury It (winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American poets) and Madness (winner of the National Poetry Series). They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Granta, Buzzfeed and elsewhere. They've received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and Lambda Literary. Currently living in Oakland California, and working at a used bookstore, they'll be a lecturer at Stanford University this Fall. Source
Miss Piggy
Great porcine drag queen
You who grew erudite in the slaughterhouse shadow
Eyelashes like black swords teased up to challenge heaven
Eternal in your powdered foundation
Refusing everyday the knife’s inevitable & unkosher ending
Be-snouted fount of youth! Seminal queer iconoclast!
Pearls to bed, pearls in the junkyard, pearls on television
Diva of late night, of talk shows, of prime time
Door-kicker for non-conventional romance
Shown us how to love across identities arbitrary as phylum & species
Bless that impossible coupling!
How you took an entire frog inside you & remained the same bad pig
Who’d karate chopped anyone dumb enough to disrespect HI-YA
What little faggot wouldn’t look upon you & be seen or saved or salved?
You who never questioned you were destined for stardom
O miss miss! O great swine demimonde! O dame pig!
I’m yours ‘til i end You, my religion How I understand us all now
We are ourselves & the hand inside that guides us
We who are given voice by that same spirit that gives voice
To everyone we have ever loved
Published:
2019
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Spoken Word
Anthology Years:
2020
Themes:
LGBTQ+ Experience
Pop Culture
Literary Devices:
Alliteration
the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession
Anaphora
a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences
Assonance
The repetition of similar vowel sounds that takes place in two or more words in proximity to each other within a line; usually refers to the repetition of internal vowel sounds in words that do not end the same.
Asyndeton
the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence
Kenning
a compound expression in Old English and Old Norse poetry with metaphorical meaning
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”