Author: Jeff Tigchelaar

Jeff Tigchelaar’s poems appear or forthcome in Pleiades, Harpur Palate, Handsome, LIT, West Wind Review, CutBank, Court Green, North American Review, Rhino, The Laurel Review, Best New Poets 2011, and Verse Daily. His work received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and has been micro-reviewed on cellpoems.org. For the magazine XYZ Topeka, he blogs about being a “stay-at-home dad.”

The #4 Jason Voorhees definition on Urbandictionary.com & The Enduring Power of Julia Child & Kenny Rogers

The #4 Jason Voorhees definition on Urbandictionary.com

person 1: lets hav premarital sex n drink beer n smoke pot
person 2: ok

(later)

person 2: i hear some thing
jason voorhees: *goes on rampage n kills them both in sick evil ways*

The Enduring Power of Julia Child

                    – Program Guide, WOUB-TV (PBS/Ohio University), June 2007: Collage

I.
Dive into a heaping helping of
Van Gogh, painting
The pork barbeque capital of the world,
Sweeping him to the edge of madness:
Memphis, Tennessee.
The moment, for Picasso,
Led to the enduring power of
Julia Child.

II.
Anne Shirley arrives at the Cuthberts’ farm on Prince Edward Island,
Located in northwest New Mexico – perhaps the only site in the world
Constructed in an elaborate pattern that mirrors the yearly cycle of the sun.
With Lionel’s father and stepmother off yak-riding in Mongolia,
A slasher slaying at the circus gets pinned on Castries the knife-thrower.
But then Archie the clown is implicated.
Mrs. Bradley probes
The canyon
And becomes “bosom” friends with Diana Barry.
It seems Anne is destined to cultivate disaster.

III.
Competing neck and neck with Gilbert Blythe,
The boys do their wurst for the Possum Lake Sausage Carnival. Meanwhile,
Mrs. Bradley probes
Julia Child,
Desperate to be loved and highly sensitive about her red hair –
A virtual celestial calendar, spanning
An area roughly the size of Ireland.
Setting high expectations for all students is important, particularly for young people
Competing neck and neck with Gilbert Blythe.

IV.
A precocious, romantic child,
Mrs. Bradley probes
The paternity
Of a college-bound culture
Fondly remembered for introducing French cuisine to American home cooks,
Which may hold a clue to the killings.

V.
Everyone panics when the lodge runs out of duct tape

Kenny Rogers

When, at 10, Kenny Rogers grew his first and only beard,
people said to him, “You look like Kenny Rogers.”
The beard was stark white from the get-go. “Hey,
it’s Kenny Rogers,” people kept saying.
Kenny took this to heart
and stayed with the look for the rest of his life.
He kept telling himself: I am Kenny Rogers.