Gus Peterson

Frankenstein’s Creature won’t shut up about being

a vegetarian, because it’s more than a phase,
it’s a moral choice, dad, when you have the eyes
of a murderer, the fingers of a thief.
When you are the meat on a table seared with heat,
still mooing, rare. So what if the wolfman
is a carnivore, if Dracula is on a liquid cleanse?
I get all the sustenance I need from this acorn,
a handful or two of berries. I don’t have a problem
with body image. I am anything but disorder,
eight feet tall, eagle swift. Cold cannot chill what
was once dead. You, who defines life so mathematically.
You, starving for calories. Go ahead. Christen me
monster. Unnatural. Who wheeled these arms and legs
in on the gurney, their different names? My brain
unaligned with a heart’s desire. I only ever killed
after tasting flesh, sitting by a fire left to burn.
But I am no Prometheus. I carry a spark,
then extinguish the flame.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Gus Peterson lives and writes in Maine. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming with Comstock Review, Pirene’s Fountain, New Verse News, Rattle and the Deep Water series in the Portland Press Herald edited by Megan Grumbling. A chapbook manuscript, Undiagnosis, was a finalist in The Poetry Box’s 2024 Chapbook Contest. A debut full length collection, Male Pattern, will be published in 2025 by Finishing Line Press.