4/14/16

Hybrid Babies
By Richard Stevenson


We’re hybrid babies –
not high-bred, not low-bred,
but incubated! Test tube spawn!

Got no Ma or Pa. No birthday
Or best by date. Just the slosh
of fluids in a transparent tube.

Hey, but we’re cute, aren’t we?
Might as well be handsome if we
can’t be handy. Two, three generations…

Not even. I shouldn’t look like
a kid with leukemia by my teens.
Look out hottie humans! I’m the new Eve.

Grab me by the ankles.
Whack me on the butt.
I can scream with the best of you.


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I’m a well-published Canadian poet ( 30 books, counting one forthcoming), three of which concern cryptids, ETs, ghosts, and unexplained phenomena: Why Were All The Werewolves Men? (Thistledown Press, 1994), Nothing Definite Yeti (Ekstasis Editions, 1999), and Take Me To Your Leader! (Bayeux Arts Inc., 2003). Initially, I was going to try to write five or six more poems to replace the weak sisters in a new and selected monster poems collection, Bigfoot Boogie, but I`m up to 67 of the suckers now, hence a fifth volume, Cryptid Shindig.

I`ve just retired from a thirty-year English, Creative Writing teaching gig at Lethbridge College and am now having a blast writing full-time. After several collections of haikai poetry, it`s nice to get back to light verse and longer things.