Selections from Bellevue Literary Review, Fall 2003

Field Trip, Ypsi State

Roy Jacobstein

We didn’t want the middle-aged females,
            their steely-stringy mental hospital hair.
                        We wanted our peers. Psych 402: Psycho-

pathology of Human Deviance.
            And the woman I got didn’t groove
                        on me, either. Was it her fault that poster

in the Arcade had pointed straight
            at her heart, that thin man in the navy
                        blue coat and long white beard telling her

Come to New Orleans.
            When I asked Why, Madge?
                        What would induce someone to fly

two thousand miles to a place
            she knows no one?, her Thorazine-
                        dulled eye fixed me like a marshmallow

on a charred brazier. Lord, Lord,
            have you ever created a bigger dolt?
                        That’s where the Mississippi River flows
           
into the Gulf of Mexico.