Decked in heavy winter attire, my brother and I sat on our back screened-in-porch in plastic rockers that had worn blue plaid cushions. It was late, the night before Christmas, so we talked softly to not wake our mom and my dad, whose bedroom is directly above the porch. Joe, with his brown hair and 5 o’clock shadow, was smoking a pack of Marlboros. His normally bright, lively blue eyes were cold as steel tonight and I wondered why he had brought me outside to talk. “I have to tell you something… but you can’t tell Mom. He paused and took a long drag on his cigarette. It wasn’t hard for me to accept Joe’s revelation until three years later. This time, his words crackled and broke me in half.
“Mary…I’m dying”.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Bitch With A Bad Mouth
A series of found poems using:
Michael Odaantje’s “The Collected Works of Billy the Kids”
Sarah Messer’s “Bandit Letters”
1.
Wife of Outlaw
They call me Bitch with a Bad Mouth
Back to the whiskey
The acid burning my gums and tongue on the way out
She is a woman, young, barely fourteen
Imagine your ghost at my bedside
Overlooked form of murder in the West
Darker than saddle leather
Blood a necklace all my life
The way they look at her; it was a need
The man who trained me; like an illness
Her voice like a birds egg in her throat crackling
They fornicated: his tongue a shard of ice between your teeth
Slow slide into adultery
The worst of the worst
Her hands; poking the gun through the planks
Like Annie Oakley, she aims
A sting on your very best thing
Do you know him? William Bonney? Caught history
The best money; to put my hands upon
Staggering in the dark
2.
Back to the whiskey: it was a need
The acid burning my gums and tongue on the way out
Her voice like a birds egg in her throat crackling
Slow slide into adultery
The worst of the worst
Wife of outlaw caught history
Overlooked form of murder in the West
She is a woman, young, barely fourteen
Darker than saddle leather
They fornicated: his tongue a shard of ice between your teeth
The man who trained me; like an illness
The way they look at her
Do you know him?
Imagine my hands upon your ghost at
Like Annie Oakley, she aims
Her hands; poking the gun through the planks
William Bonney; staggering in the dark
A sting on your very best thing
They call me Bitch with a Bad Mouth
3.
Whiskey; it’s a need
The acid burning my gums and tongue on the way out
His voice like a birds egg crackling in my ears
Slow slide into adultery
The worst of the worst
Wife of outlaw caught history
Overlooked form of murder in the West
She is a woman, barely fourteen; darker than saddle leather
The man who trained me; we fornicated.
His tongue a shard of ice between my teeth
The way he looks at me; like an illness
Do you know him?
Staggering in the dark: William Bonney.
My hands upon his ghost.
Poking a gun through the planks
Like Annie Oakley, she aims
A sting on your very best thing
They call me Bitch with a Bad Mouth
4.
Murder in the West
Wife of outlaw caught history
A woman, barely fourteen; darker than saddle leather
The worst of the worst
His voice; a bird’s egg crackling
We fornicated: his tongue a shard of ice between my teeth
The way he looks at me:
Burning like whiskey on the way out
Slow slide into adultery
That man staggering in the dark
Do you know him?
William Bonney?
My hands, poking a gun through the planks
Aiming, I am Annie Oakley
A sting on his very best thing
They call me Bitch with a Bad Mouth
Michael Odaantje’s “The Collected Works of Billy the Kids”
Sarah Messer’s “Bandit Letters”
1.
Wife of Outlaw
They call me Bitch with a Bad Mouth
Back to the whiskey
The acid burning my gums and tongue on the way out
She is a woman, young, barely fourteen
Imagine your ghost at my bedside
Overlooked form of murder in the West
Darker than saddle leather
Blood a necklace all my life
The way they look at her; it was a need
The man who trained me; like an illness
Her voice like a birds egg in her throat crackling
They fornicated: his tongue a shard of ice between your teeth
Slow slide into adultery
The worst of the worst
Her hands; poking the gun through the planks
Like Annie Oakley, she aims
A sting on your very best thing
Do you know him? William Bonney? Caught history
The best money; to put my hands upon
Staggering in the dark
2.
Back to the whiskey: it was a need
The acid burning my gums and tongue on the way out
Her voice like a birds egg in her throat crackling
Slow slide into adultery
The worst of the worst
Wife of outlaw caught history
Overlooked form of murder in the West
She is a woman, young, barely fourteen
Darker than saddle leather
They fornicated: his tongue a shard of ice between your teeth
The man who trained me; like an illness
The way they look at her
Do you know him?
Imagine my hands upon your ghost at
Like Annie Oakley, she aims
Her hands; poking the gun through the planks
William Bonney; staggering in the dark
A sting on your very best thing
They call me Bitch with a Bad Mouth
3.
Whiskey; it’s a need
The acid burning my gums and tongue on the way out
His voice like a birds egg crackling in my ears
Slow slide into adultery
The worst of the worst
Wife of outlaw caught history
Overlooked form of murder in the West
She is a woman, barely fourteen; darker than saddle leather
The man who trained me; we fornicated.
His tongue a shard of ice between my teeth
The way he looks at me; like an illness
Do you know him?
Staggering in the dark: William Bonney.
My hands upon his ghost.
Poking a gun through the planks
Like Annie Oakley, she aims
A sting on your very best thing
They call me Bitch with a Bad Mouth
4.
Murder in the West
Wife of outlaw caught history
A woman, barely fourteen; darker than saddle leather
The worst of the worst
His voice; a bird’s egg crackling
We fornicated: his tongue a shard of ice between my teeth
The way he looks at me:
Burning like whiskey on the way out
Slow slide into adultery
That man staggering in the dark
Do you know him?
William Bonney?
My hands, poking a gun through the planks
Aiming, I am Annie Oakley
A sting on his very best thing
They call me Bitch with a Bad Mouth
Dead Cat Sequence: From 2006
1. him sleeping with his mouth wide open
plaid sheets spotted by dry saliva
dead cat in the hay
a man standing on the edge of an aluminum can, his arms over his head ready to dive in.
2. Aluminum Can.
Dead cat in the hay, sleeping with his mouth wide open.
Spotted by dry saliva.
A man standing at the edge of plaid sheets; ready to dive in.
3. Spotted by dry saliva.
Dead cat in the hay.
Cut tongue; ready to dive in.
Aluminum mouth; sleeping can wide open.
4. Wide open aluminum mouth.
Sleeping, cut tongue.
Spotted by dry saliva.
Dead cat in the hay.
Ready to dive into last liquid drop.
5. Sleeping cut tongue.
Spotted by dry saliva.
Ready to dive into last liquid drop.
Wide open aluminum mouth.
Dead cat in the hay.
6. Bloodied, cut tongue.
Spotted with dry saliva.
Ready to dive into last liquid drop.
Wide open aluminum mouth.
Dead cat in the hay.
plaid sheets spotted by dry saliva
dead cat in the hay
a man standing on the edge of an aluminum can, his arms over his head ready to dive in.
2. Aluminum Can.
Dead cat in the hay, sleeping with his mouth wide open.
Spotted by dry saliva.
A man standing at the edge of plaid sheets; ready to dive in.
3. Spotted by dry saliva.
Dead cat in the hay.
Cut tongue; ready to dive in.
Aluminum mouth; sleeping can wide open.
4. Wide open aluminum mouth.
Sleeping, cut tongue.
Spotted by dry saliva.
Dead cat in the hay.
Ready to dive into last liquid drop.
5. Sleeping cut tongue.
Spotted by dry saliva.
Ready to dive into last liquid drop.
Wide open aluminum mouth.
Dead cat in the hay.
6. Bloodied, cut tongue.
Spotted with dry saliva.
Ready to dive into last liquid drop.
Wide open aluminum mouth.
Dead cat in the hay.
Lovettsville, My Hometown
Lovettsville, bordering the Potomac River of Maryland is the northernmost town in Virginia, and habitually the least heard of. Unlike its neighboring towns and cities, Lovettsville doesn’t have a Blockbuster or a McDonalds or five competing grocery stores. It’s not the kind of town you can just drive through either. Most of the residents in Lovettsville don’t even live in the town limits. It is on the back gravel roads and in the rolling fields that you can find our residents thriving; and also where you can experience nature at its best. Traveling down the country roads in Lovettsville gives you a chance to tour our farms and wineries, stay at our cozy bed and breakfasts’, and discover our off the beaten path historic treasures. You won’t be the first to fall in love with our charming town and settle in.
Lovettsville’s German settlers came from Bavaria, which is a present-day state in southern Germany. Before Bavaria was declared a state, it was part of what was referred to as the Rhineland-Palatinate. A palatinate is a region of land or territory controlled by a count Palatine, which is not a person, but a Roman style of legislature and electoral duties. By the 13th century, the Rhineland Palatinate was one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire, and so was also called the Electoral Palatinate.
During the Thirty Years War, which arose due to religious conflict between the Protestants and the Catholics, the Rhineland-Palatinate was consumed by war and plague. The early ancestors of Lovettsville’s settlers traveled from their homeland in the Rhineland-Palatinate to New Amsterdam, present day New York. Not being able to find compatible jobs in New Amsterdam, the Germans moved their farm families south to Pennsylvania, where many of them remain to this day in the Pennsylvania-Dutch communities (Wikipedia). In “Lovettsville the German Settlement”, the late Reverend Michael Kretsinger noted that while some settlers did stop at Lovettsville, others continued down through Virginia to the Shenandoah Valley, where the earth was rich and fertile with limestone.
In an article by Lovettsville’s Town Mayor Elaine Walker in “Celebration of a Heritage”, early records indicate that the first person to come to the Lovettsville area was Elder William Wenner in 1720. In 1732, other settlers from Pennsylvania came to Lovettsville to settle in what was then known as the German Settlement. Elder Wenner served as the settlement minister as well as the schoolmaster. At first, baptisms and church services were performed in the homes of the new settlers. Later a log church was built at the site that is presently the Reformed Church Cemetery. The established name of the church was St. James United Church of Christ, and it remains as the oldest church of German Reformed origin in the tri-state area, as well as the oldest active Reformed congregation in Virginia. The modern St. James church is located in town on East Broad Way Street.
According to Lovettsville the German Settlement by Yetive Rockefeller Weatherly, the Germans did not interact with the English speaking neighbors because they were cut off by their location, foreign customs and language. Fortunately, the Germans were very skilled artisans and provided themselves everything they needed for their plain, farming lives. They worked metal to make tools, made clocks and furniture, wove cloth, cobbled shoes, milled flour, and even found time to distill liquor.
Daniel Lovett was one of the original sixty-five families to settle the area in 1732. In 1820, his grandson David decided to subdivide part of the family farmland, located at the site of the present incorporated village of Lovettsville, into quarter-acre plots and sell them off. Up until the start of the Civil War, the “German Settlement” was still known as such. Sometime between 1730 and 1820, the town was called Thrasher’s Store after one of its general stores and New Town or NewTown after that. It was not until 1828 that the town name of Lovettsville was used.
For the past several years, Lovettsville has held a town wide celebration of its heritage to honor its first settlers. Of course, the celebration is open to everyone. This year, the 14th annual Oktoberfest will be held on Saturday, September 29, 2007, rain or shine. Come out to our home sweet home and enjoy an old fashioned Volksmarch which is a short jaunt through the town, watch visiting German dancers and musicians, purchase arts and crafts, and of course, treat yourself to some wiener schnitzel, beer, and wine.
Lovettsville’s German settlers came from Bavaria, which is a present-day state in southern Germany. Before Bavaria was declared a state, it was part of what was referred to as the Rhineland-Palatinate. A palatinate is a region of land or territory controlled by a count Palatine, which is not a person, but a Roman style of legislature and electoral duties. By the 13th century, the Rhineland Palatinate was one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire, and so was also called the Electoral Palatinate.
During the Thirty Years War, which arose due to religious conflict between the Protestants and the Catholics, the Rhineland-Palatinate was consumed by war and plague. The early ancestors of Lovettsville’s settlers traveled from their homeland in the Rhineland-Palatinate to New Amsterdam, present day New York. Not being able to find compatible jobs in New Amsterdam, the Germans moved their farm families south to Pennsylvania, where many of them remain to this day in the Pennsylvania-Dutch communities (Wikipedia). In “Lovettsville the German Settlement”, the late Reverend Michael Kretsinger noted that while some settlers did stop at Lovettsville, others continued down through Virginia to the Shenandoah Valley, where the earth was rich and fertile with limestone.
In an article by Lovettsville’s Town Mayor Elaine Walker in “Celebration of a Heritage”, early records indicate that the first person to come to the Lovettsville area was Elder William Wenner in 1720. In 1732, other settlers from Pennsylvania came to Lovettsville to settle in what was then known as the German Settlement. Elder Wenner served as the settlement minister as well as the schoolmaster. At first, baptisms and church services were performed in the homes of the new settlers. Later a log church was built at the site that is presently the Reformed Church Cemetery. The established name of the church was St. James United Church of Christ, and it remains as the oldest church of German Reformed origin in the tri-state area, as well as the oldest active Reformed congregation in Virginia. The modern St. James church is located in town on East Broad Way Street.
According to Lovettsville the German Settlement by Yetive Rockefeller Weatherly, the Germans did not interact with the English speaking neighbors because they were cut off by their location, foreign customs and language. Fortunately, the Germans were very skilled artisans and provided themselves everything they needed for their plain, farming lives. They worked metal to make tools, made clocks and furniture, wove cloth, cobbled shoes, milled flour, and even found time to distill liquor.
Daniel Lovett was one of the original sixty-five families to settle the area in 1732. In 1820, his grandson David decided to subdivide part of the family farmland, located at the site of the present incorporated village of Lovettsville, into quarter-acre plots and sell them off. Up until the start of the Civil War, the “German Settlement” was still known as such. Sometime between 1730 and 1820, the town was called Thrasher’s Store after one of its general stores and New Town or NewTown after that. It was not until 1828 that the town name of Lovettsville was used.
For the past several years, Lovettsville has held a town wide celebration of its heritage to honor its first settlers. Of course, the celebration is open to everyone. This year, the 14th annual Oktoberfest will be held on Saturday, September 29, 2007, rain or shine. Come out to our home sweet home and enjoy an old fashioned Volksmarch which is a short jaunt through the town, watch visiting German dancers and musicians, purchase arts and crafts, and of course, treat yourself to some wiener schnitzel, beer, and wine.
Backseat Admirer:: 2nd Draft
In all honesty, I’m terrible with directions.
When I ride in cars, I always look out the side window.
This inclination began when I was a child;
I was too small to ride in the front seat.
I like to watch:
trees rush by;
flocks of birds
weighing down power lines
or resting on shivering ponds.
On rural roads, local drivers and wanderers wave hello,
and porch sitters share stories through a petty glance.
Parting from my home in the countryside
to visit the bank or grocery store:
the gradual devolution of pasture to gravel road
to asphalt and then to cement;
is a welcomed sight
…sometimes…
it’s like watching evolution in fast forward
depending on which way I’m travelling.
These days, I am the driver
and I frequently travel in the wrong direction,
despite my best intentions.
Yet, this routine is tolerable:
I’d much rather travel through this world watching life continue,
then to remember where humans built roads.
When I ride in cars, I always look out the side window.
This inclination began when I was a child;
I was too small to ride in the front seat.
I like to watch:
trees rush by;
flocks of birds
weighing down power lines
or resting on shivering ponds.
On rural roads, local drivers and wanderers wave hello,
and porch sitters share stories through a petty glance.
Parting from my home in the countryside
to visit the bank or grocery store:
the gradual devolution of pasture to gravel road
to asphalt and then to cement;
is a welcomed sight
…sometimes…
it’s like watching evolution in fast forward
depending on which way I’m travelling.
These days, I am the driver
and I frequently travel in the wrong direction,
despite my best intentions.
Yet, this routine is tolerable:
I’d much rather travel through this world watching life continue,
then to remember where humans built roads.
Iman
Thankfully, Iman left school after that year. I was relieved because it meant I didn’t have to walk quickly past him when he was talking to others, nor would I have to look him awkwardly in the eye when it was just the two of us in the dorm hall. It was sophomore year and I lived two doors from the end of the stairwell. Iman and his roommate lived one floor up, one room down, but across the hall.
Now here was my predicament: I had spent the past several hours doing the usual things that lonely girls do at night…roaming around campus desperately searching for their friendless male counterpart. I was on a mission to find a mate and I knew that if I just kept walking, just kept seeking, my man of reverie would crawl out of the woodwork and find me.
However, my state of depression not only caused me to feel cheerless and disheartened, but it also led me to believe that if I got real drunk, guys would want me; because guys always dig the fun, drunk, loud girls at the party. So I kept walking and I kept drinking and of course, I grew more and more despondent, and realized that alcohol wasn’t going to be strong enough this night; I needed some bona-fide herbal healing to get my mind off of my miserable state of being. I just needed a couple hits.
Iman was an outlet of livelihood on campus, so when I saw his bedroom lights on in my dorm as I was heading back home I knew that he was my last chance for solace. I hadn’t always been on the best terms with Iman and his friends; I knew I had a slim chance of getting into his room, but I was in a state of urgency when I smelled the vapors escaping from his door. I knocked once, turned the knob, and stumbled into Iman’s den.
Three boys turned to look at once.
“Oh… hi… I heard you guys up. I couldn’t sleep either.” Iman looked at me and I gazed into his eyes. I hoped that he would let me stay; I hoped that he would help me forget my feelings. “Yea Mary, come on in, come on in. What is Mary, Mary up to tonight?” I pushed the door a little, but there was a towel on the floor, so I scooted in and pushed the towel into the crack under the door where it was needed.
“I’ve just been drinking”. I had my big red cup in my hand and I held it up and stumbled over to sit between the guys. I know that they all noticed how I wobbled into the room and crashed in the middle of the bedroom floor. Iman was sitting on his mattress which was on the floor under his roommates bunk, and I sat right next to that, in between the two guys that were playing video games on opposite sides of the room. They were playing FIFA soccer and I remember thinking that if only I knew how to play video games, loads of guys would be interested in me. The boys had been smoking and I could smell it on them; I hoped that they had more left and when Iman asked me if I wanted to share a bowl with them, I was inwardly thrilled.
We all had a couple hits and finally I was feeling relaxed. Maybe the night wasn’t going to be a totally failure after all. Iman asked me if I wanted some really expensive, really fine liquor that I had never heard of before and I told him I did, and then as if it were an unspoken code, the two boys playing video games felt suddenly exhausted and said they were going to try and catch some sleep. So they left and Iman got me a drink, and while I drank that sweet divine, he packed another bowl, started a movie and sat down on the floor next to me.
I was swimming in my head; my eyes were extra hazy from the mixture of booze and herbal delight that we had refilled ourselves with and when Iman started to rub his hands up and down my legs, and over my thighs, I was more than ready for him.
But we didn’t fuck upstairs in his room. We went downstairs to my single, and I laid down on my back for him and let him in. He didn’t fuck me hard, but he was thick and longer than I had experienced before and he went in deep. He took it to the limit and a little farther and stayed in longer than I thought was necessary and he took his time about it. He was such a big man and he was drunk and stoned and so was I and he felt like a brick wall crushing down into me. I just couldn’t get him off me and he ignored my cries to stop, and all I could think was that it wasn’t his fault. I was the one who had come to his room searching for closeness. But something had gone wrong in my plan… this closeness was too close and not nearly as personal as I wanted it to be.
When he was finished, I thought that this was my time. I thought that he would stay with me for the night; I thought for sure he would stay and hold me close to his body, and make me at least feel loved for one short night.
But he didn’t stay. When he left, I locked my door, and crawled into bed naked and sore. I buried my tears into my pillow, and cried myself to sleep, feeling broken and stupid and used, as I deserved to be.
Now here was my predicament: I had spent the past several hours doing the usual things that lonely girls do at night…roaming around campus desperately searching for their friendless male counterpart. I was on a mission to find a mate and I knew that if I just kept walking, just kept seeking, my man of reverie would crawl out of the woodwork and find me.
However, my state of depression not only caused me to feel cheerless and disheartened, but it also led me to believe that if I got real drunk, guys would want me; because guys always dig the fun, drunk, loud girls at the party. So I kept walking and I kept drinking and of course, I grew more and more despondent, and realized that alcohol wasn’t going to be strong enough this night; I needed some bona-fide herbal healing to get my mind off of my miserable state of being. I just needed a couple hits.
Iman was an outlet of livelihood on campus, so when I saw his bedroom lights on in my dorm as I was heading back home I knew that he was my last chance for solace. I hadn’t always been on the best terms with Iman and his friends; I knew I had a slim chance of getting into his room, but I was in a state of urgency when I smelled the vapors escaping from his door. I knocked once, turned the knob, and stumbled into Iman’s den.
Three boys turned to look at once.
“Oh… hi… I heard you guys up. I couldn’t sleep either.” Iman looked at me and I gazed into his eyes. I hoped that he would let me stay; I hoped that he would help me forget my feelings. “Yea Mary, come on in, come on in. What is Mary, Mary up to tonight?” I pushed the door a little, but there was a towel on the floor, so I scooted in and pushed the towel into the crack under the door where it was needed.
“I’ve just been drinking”. I had my big red cup in my hand and I held it up and stumbled over to sit between the guys. I know that they all noticed how I wobbled into the room and crashed in the middle of the bedroom floor. Iman was sitting on his mattress which was on the floor under his roommates bunk, and I sat right next to that, in between the two guys that were playing video games on opposite sides of the room. They were playing FIFA soccer and I remember thinking that if only I knew how to play video games, loads of guys would be interested in me. The boys had been smoking and I could smell it on them; I hoped that they had more left and when Iman asked me if I wanted to share a bowl with them, I was inwardly thrilled.
We all had a couple hits and finally I was feeling relaxed. Maybe the night wasn’t going to be a totally failure after all. Iman asked me if I wanted some really expensive, really fine liquor that I had never heard of before and I told him I did, and then as if it were an unspoken code, the two boys playing video games felt suddenly exhausted and said they were going to try and catch some sleep. So they left and Iman got me a drink, and while I drank that sweet divine, he packed another bowl, started a movie and sat down on the floor next to me.
I was swimming in my head; my eyes were extra hazy from the mixture of booze and herbal delight that we had refilled ourselves with and when Iman started to rub his hands up and down my legs, and over my thighs, I was more than ready for him.
But we didn’t fuck upstairs in his room. We went downstairs to my single, and I laid down on my back for him and let him in. He didn’t fuck me hard, but he was thick and longer than I had experienced before and he went in deep. He took it to the limit and a little farther and stayed in longer than I thought was necessary and he took his time about it. He was such a big man and he was drunk and stoned and so was I and he felt like a brick wall crushing down into me. I just couldn’t get him off me and he ignored my cries to stop, and all I could think was that it wasn’t his fault. I was the one who had come to his room searching for closeness. But something had gone wrong in my plan… this closeness was too close and not nearly as personal as I wanted it to be.
When he was finished, I thought that this was my time. I thought that he would stay with me for the night; I thought for sure he would stay and hold me close to his body, and make me at least feel loved for one short night.
But he didn’t stay. When he left, I locked my door, and crawled into bed naked and sore. I buried my tears into my pillow, and cried myself to sleep, feeling broken and stupid and used, as I deserved to be.
T and Will
“You did what!?” T picks up his cell phone. “Man, you hear this shit? This shit’s crazy.”
The way T’s laughing and carrying on to the guy on the phone with him, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself for the way I handled the situation.
“Shit girl, did you sever it? Where is he? Is he cryin’?”
“No I didn’t sever it… I just bit it …hard. What was I supposed to do, he wouldn’t let me go”.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t like that. I didn’t go down on him. He said he had wanted to talk to me outside. Actually, he had said that he wanted to feel my lips on his, one more time; that would have been the second time. The first time was a peck; he had had his hands between my legs and all over my lap in the car on the way to the bar and at the red light he had made me feel his astonishing thick, eight inch “personality”. He was Salvadorian and Italian and I couldn’t resist his dark eyes and Latino accent. Now normally, it was I who grabbed first, but tonight, for the first time, it was different. Tonight I felt the burden that I was carrying.
When we got to the bar, he wanted to grab me in the parking lot and then again in the bar while we sat on the bar stools; but I didn’t want it. How could I fool around when T was sitting was with us? I had been overwhelmingly depressed for good reasons at Crazy Eights, and he had sat down next to me and talked on and on about how we were going to be the best of friends as slowly he inched his barstool closer to mine and he talked to me of going fishing and art and bowling, things I actually enjoy doing and I forgot about being sad and the billiards and all the rounds of beer that he and T and other’s had guzzled down.
But at the bar, I didn’t want to kiss him there with T sitting right next to me. I didn’t want to give him a real kiss with my lips and my tongue loving on his lips and his tongue; I didn’t want to kiss him for real, because he had a fiancée. He had a fiancée whom I had met and shook hands with four hours prior to the three of us going to the bar. And five hours prior to the three of us going to the bar, I had met the he and T for the first time at the Crazy Eights pool hall. And seven hours prior to that, I had received news from my doctor that I had signs of the human papiloma virus and other atypical cells in my cervix. And one hour later, I had gone to the liquor store to stock up on gin and juice, then to the gas station to make sure I would make it to Sam’s birthday party, but the gas pumps weren’t working, because the gas pump attendant said I had laid my debit card down on the magnetic strip at the liquor store and that had ruined the strip on my card and that’s why the pay at the pump hadn’t worked, but he fixed it which calmed me down a bit, but the fact that I had gone to the grocery store and spent twenty minutes looking for the damn pineapple juice for the gin and juice that I had purchased for Sam’s birthday, had pushed me over the edge, and my best friends in North Carolina hadn’t answered their phones so I could tell them the bad news, and so I spent the whole drive down to Crazy Eights from Leesburg to Sterling cursing God the Almighty for fucking over my whole life by cursing me with the lonely girls burden.
But at the bar, he was in control of my delicate state. He told me again that if I would be his new friend and lover and playmate and that if he really liked me, he would leave his fiancée. And at the pool house, this thought had excited me and I opened my legs so that he could feel how excited it made me. And that had driven him on, it had given him a newly energized and even more powerful clutch on the situation, but I would not figure that out until a few hours later when the three of us were at the bar and he was urgently begging me for a second kiss.
I had told him and T hours before that I had a 1:30 am curfew, which was new; and that I had to leave by 12:30 am to get home on time. But it was completely obvious to me at 11:30 pm that he was going to have his way with Cinderella by the stroke of midnight despite what she said. Of course I was frustrated, but mostly I was upset. I had been cheated on once before and it had been a bad breakup, a real bad breakup. It had been the kind of high school breakup that lands you in the hospital for a day and in therapy for the rest of your life. In hindsight though, that therapy had been one of the good parts of my life, because here I was now recognizing that what this engaged man was doing was wrong and that his fiancée should know that this is how he acts around other women and that she should not have to feel the way that I know she will feel when she finds out that he has cheated on her.
And I start to realize that this man is sleazy. Earlier he couldn’t tell me why he loved his fiancée and why he had proposed to her other than the fact that he had to hold onto the one woman that he thought was the one. But now, by pursuing me and my body so avidly, he was threatening his own marriage, his own sacred ceremony; the one ceremony that I have spent countless nights yearning for.
When I asked for my bill, that bartender had put T and his’ beers on my tab, and I was not about to pay for their bill: we had just met, but we weren’t exactly old pals. I was just going to pay for my part of the bill, but he kept saying some bullshit about how I was his friend now and I guess his lover and how he was going to pick up the tab, but I was confused on why he wanted to pay, when I had my own money, but I gave up on trying to understand his nonsense and left the bill on the counter.
T was so dazed from the 5 or so pitchers of beer, and the beer at the bar which he had split with his friends, that he didn’t really talk to me except when my pursuer went to the bathroom. Then he leaned over to me and said “you see those two men across from us”? “They’re playas. They’re about to dump hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars on those girls tonight”. Those girls he was talking about looked nothing like me. They were both skinny, clear faced, and had huge breasts that were spilling out of their low necked shirts. There was a white man and a black man chatting it up with the girls. I could tell that the black man had style and finesse; he looked liked he could be a nice guy, but he had to step back from his game, because the white guy was desperate. The white guy was so desperate he was high-fiving the girls, I guess whenever he had something in common with them. I could tell by the way the girls were laughing that they were more laughing at him and his pathetic game then they were at the things they may have had in common.
T fell back into a daze when he came back from the bathroom and tried to slide his hands around my thighs. Throughout the hour or so at the bar, I had told him to stop, stop, stop, stop! But then afterwards, I had made the mistake of grabbing him under the table. He told me that it wasn’t fair that I could touch but he couldn’t touch me back. And finally, when I couldn’t hold him back anymore, he followed me outside, as we left T at the bar.
He had said he had just wanted to feel my lips on his, but the truth was that had been part of his plan. He must have known that if he could get me outside in the parking lot to chat, that he could just as easily get me into my car to chat, and once we got into my car, he stroked me again, which was hard to resist. But I did. I didn’t want him to do those things to me, in a car, in a lit parking lot, while T was waiting for us at the bar, and we had told him that we would go outside a moment to talk. I told him that I didn’t want to do this in a parking lot, I didn’t want to get arrested for public-god-knows-what and that I had to be home soon. He said alright; he said that he would go, but he looked at me so sincerely and asked for just one last kiss. And, of course, I melted. And I leaned forward to kiss him, and we kissed for a moment and then he pushed his mouth back into mine and locked himself onto my face. He was using his hand to grab the back of my head and push it into his face and his other hand to grab between my legs. I tried to pull my head backwards, but I couldn’t; he was actually forcing my head into his so he could lip lock me and I kept pulling my head back, because it was starting to be that I couldn’t breathe, and he kept holding me tight so that couldn’t get out of his grip, and for a moment fear rushed through me, because I wasn’t in control of the situation, but in the next moment I took control. In the next moment, his tongue entered my mouth and instead of reciprocating, I bit down with my teeth; I bit down on his tongue to the point where I could feel it actually crunch under my teeth. And immediately he let go of my head and jerked away, looking at me bewildered, as if I was the one who had stepped over the line, and he grabbed my rearview mirror of my car and twisted it in such a way towards him to look at his tongue in the mirror that I became immediately alarmed that he was going to break off the mirror to my brand new Honda Fit, and that’s when I starting screaming.
“Get out of my car! Get the fuck out of my car!”
And in the next moment, he got the fuck out of my car, and I immediately locked the car doors, and reversed the car out of the parking lot and I pulled in next to T’s car, because I had seen him walk past my car on his way out of the bar, where he must have thought we had bailed on him to go to a hotel room, but we hadn’t, and I wanted to say goodbye to him, before I drove home for the night.
I wanted to say goodbye because he hadn’t done me wrong that night, his friend had. After we exchanged numbers, he told me to just brush off what happened tonight, to just brush it off my shoulder, and as I sat there thinking whether I should pull out or not, he came and stood next to my car, and I rolled up the windows and smiled sardonically at him, with the doors locked. And I thought to myself, that maybe I had gone too far, but at the same time that he shouldn’t have held on to me, but before I could really think things through, T pulled out of the parking space, in his black sedan, and I followed the two friends. Sitting at a stop sign, I watched them cross the double lanes, pulling straight ahead of me, on their way to Fairfax, where I knew T lived, and I turned left and then left again at the intersection, and finally, I turned my back on them.
The way T’s laughing and carrying on to the guy on the phone with him, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself for the way I handled the situation.
“Shit girl, did you sever it? Where is he? Is he cryin’?”
“No I didn’t sever it… I just bit it …hard. What was I supposed to do, he wouldn’t let me go”.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t like that. I didn’t go down on him. He said he had wanted to talk to me outside. Actually, he had said that he wanted to feel my lips on his, one more time; that would have been the second time. The first time was a peck; he had had his hands between my legs and all over my lap in the car on the way to the bar and at the red light he had made me feel his astonishing thick, eight inch “personality”. He was Salvadorian and Italian and I couldn’t resist his dark eyes and Latino accent. Now normally, it was I who grabbed first, but tonight, for the first time, it was different. Tonight I felt the burden that I was carrying.
When we got to the bar, he wanted to grab me in the parking lot and then again in the bar while we sat on the bar stools; but I didn’t want it. How could I fool around when T was sitting was with us? I had been overwhelmingly depressed for good reasons at Crazy Eights, and he had sat down next to me and talked on and on about how we were going to be the best of friends as slowly he inched his barstool closer to mine and he talked to me of going fishing and art and bowling, things I actually enjoy doing and I forgot about being sad and the billiards and all the rounds of beer that he and T and other’s had guzzled down.
But at the bar, I didn’t want to kiss him there with T sitting right next to me. I didn’t want to give him a real kiss with my lips and my tongue loving on his lips and his tongue; I didn’t want to kiss him for real, because he had a fiancée. He had a fiancée whom I had met and shook hands with four hours prior to the three of us going to the bar. And five hours prior to the three of us going to the bar, I had met the he and T for the first time at the Crazy Eights pool hall. And seven hours prior to that, I had received news from my doctor that I had signs of the human papiloma virus and other atypical cells in my cervix. And one hour later, I had gone to the liquor store to stock up on gin and juice, then to the gas station to make sure I would make it to Sam’s birthday party, but the gas pumps weren’t working, because the gas pump attendant said I had laid my debit card down on the magnetic strip at the liquor store and that had ruined the strip on my card and that’s why the pay at the pump hadn’t worked, but he fixed it which calmed me down a bit, but the fact that I had gone to the grocery store and spent twenty minutes looking for the damn pineapple juice for the gin and juice that I had purchased for Sam’s birthday, had pushed me over the edge, and my best friends in North Carolina hadn’t answered their phones so I could tell them the bad news, and so I spent the whole drive down to Crazy Eights from Leesburg to Sterling cursing God the Almighty for fucking over my whole life by cursing me with the lonely girls burden.
But at the bar, he was in control of my delicate state. He told me again that if I would be his new friend and lover and playmate and that if he really liked me, he would leave his fiancée. And at the pool house, this thought had excited me and I opened my legs so that he could feel how excited it made me. And that had driven him on, it had given him a newly energized and even more powerful clutch on the situation, but I would not figure that out until a few hours later when the three of us were at the bar and he was urgently begging me for a second kiss.
I had told him and T hours before that I had a 1:30 am curfew, which was new; and that I had to leave by 12:30 am to get home on time. But it was completely obvious to me at 11:30 pm that he was going to have his way with Cinderella by the stroke of midnight despite what she said. Of course I was frustrated, but mostly I was upset. I had been cheated on once before and it had been a bad breakup, a real bad breakup. It had been the kind of high school breakup that lands you in the hospital for a day and in therapy for the rest of your life. In hindsight though, that therapy had been one of the good parts of my life, because here I was now recognizing that what this engaged man was doing was wrong and that his fiancée should know that this is how he acts around other women and that she should not have to feel the way that I know she will feel when she finds out that he has cheated on her.
And I start to realize that this man is sleazy. Earlier he couldn’t tell me why he loved his fiancée and why he had proposed to her other than the fact that he had to hold onto the one woman that he thought was the one. But now, by pursuing me and my body so avidly, he was threatening his own marriage, his own sacred ceremony; the one ceremony that I have spent countless nights yearning for.
When I asked for my bill, that bartender had put T and his’ beers on my tab, and I was not about to pay for their bill: we had just met, but we weren’t exactly old pals. I was just going to pay for my part of the bill, but he kept saying some bullshit about how I was his friend now and I guess his lover and how he was going to pick up the tab, but I was confused on why he wanted to pay, when I had my own money, but I gave up on trying to understand his nonsense and left the bill on the counter.
T was so dazed from the 5 or so pitchers of beer, and the beer at the bar which he had split with his friends, that he didn’t really talk to me except when my pursuer went to the bathroom. Then he leaned over to me and said “you see those two men across from us”? “They’re playas. They’re about to dump hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars on those girls tonight”. Those girls he was talking about looked nothing like me. They were both skinny, clear faced, and had huge breasts that were spilling out of their low necked shirts. There was a white man and a black man chatting it up with the girls. I could tell that the black man had style and finesse; he looked liked he could be a nice guy, but he had to step back from his game, because the white guy was desperate. The white guy was so desperate he was high-fiving the girls, I guess whenever he had something in common with them. I could tell by the way the girls were laughing that they were more laughing at him and his pathetic game then they were at the things they may have had in common.
T fell back into a daze when he came back from the bathroom and tried to slide his hands around my thighs. Throughout the hour or so at the bar, I had told him to stop, stop, stop, stop! But then afterwards, I had made the mistake of grabbing him under the table. He told me that it wasn’t fair that I could touch but he couldn’t touch me back. And finally, when I couldn’t hold him back anymore, he followed me outside, as we left T at the bar.
He had said he had just wanted to feel my lips on his, but the truth was that had been part of his plan. He must have known that if he could get me outside in the parking lot to chat, that he could just as easily get me into my car to chat, and once we got into my car, he stroked me again, which was hard to resist. But I did. I didn’t want him to do those things to me, in a car, in a lit parking lot, while T was waiting for us at the bar, and we had told him that we would go outside a moment to talk. I told him that I didn’t want to do this in a parking lot, I didn’t want to get arrested for public-god-knows-what and that I had to be home soon. He said alright; he said that he would go, but he looked at me so sincerely and asked for just one last kiss. And, of course, I melted. And I leaned forward to kiss him, and we kissed for a moment and then he pushed his mouth back into mine and locked himself onto my face. He was using his hand to grab the back of my head and push it into his face and his other hand to grab between my legs. I tried to pull my head backwards, but I couldn’t; he was actually forcing my head into his so he could lip lock me and I kept pulling my head back, because it was starting to be that I couldn’t breathe, and he kept holding me tight so that couldn’t get out of his grip, and for a moment fear rushed through me, because I wasn’t in control of the situation, but in the next moment I took control. In the next moment, his tongue entered my mouth and instead of reciprocating, I bit down with my teeth; I bit down on his tongue to the point where I could feel it actually crunch under my teeth. And immediately he let go of my head and jerked away, looking at me bewildered, as if I was the one who had stepped over the line, and he grabbed my rearview mirror of my car and twisted it in such a way towards him to look at his tongue in the mirror that I became immediately alarmed that he was going to break off the mirror to my brand new Honda Fit, and that’s when I starting screaming.
“Get out of my car! Get the fuck out of my car!”
And in the next moment, he got the fuck out of my car, and I immediately locked the car doors, and reversed the car out of the parking lot and I pulled in next to T’s car, because I had seen him walk past my car on his way out of the bar, where he must have thought we had bailed on him to go to a hotel room, but we hadn’t, and I wanted to say goodbye to him, before I drove home for the night.
I wanted to say goodbye because he hadn’t done me wrong that night, his friend had. After we exchanged numbers, he told me to just brush off what happened tonight, to just brush it off my shoulder, and as I sat there thinking whether I should pull out or not, he came and stood next to my car, and I rolled up the windows and smiled sardonically at him, with the doors locked. And I thought to myself, that maybe I had gone too far, but at the same time that he shouldn’t have held on to me, but before I could really think things through, T pulled out of the parking space, in his black sedan, and I followed the two friends. Sitting at a stop sign, I watched them cross the double lanes, pulling straight ahead of me, on their way to Fairfax, where I knew T lived, and I turned left and then left again at the intersection, and finally, I turned my back on them.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Just a Little While More
Damn it. I don’t want to rely on these pills.
I shouldn’t be online either; in this condition.
Nor should I let you pick me up in your work van.
But I do.
You give me that toothy grin and my nerves begin to dance.
I start to think about missing teens on “
As if you know, you reach over and rub your hand over my crotch.
Your freshly showered soap scent mixes with your cologne and filters into my brain.
I can’t resist the smell of your body; I’m hooked.
It doesn’t really matter that your 5, 10, 15 years my senior.
I know what I want and you know how to give it.
Fucking in your car, my bed, your brother’s bed;
We’re so brazen.
I want you to grab me, yeah, just like that.
But not too hard, or I’ll remember why
I shouldn’t be here.
Manhandle me, but don’t call me a Whore.
Don’t connect me with your past,
I have my own.
Don’t talk about your job, your car, your ex-girlfriend.
I just want to feel needed, if only for this one moment.
Don’t you get it? Make me whole:
Just use me while I’m here.
Tell me how you like what I’m doing;
Make me feel like I belong somewhere
For just a little while more.
Vincent’s First Interaction with Pond Scum
Belly face down, Vincent peeked over the edge of the embankment. The water was covered with a thin layer of yellowish-green frog slime, yet he could still see several tiny fish darting just below the surface. Grabbing a stick, from underneath the willow that wept around him, Vincent poked the slime hoping to tear it away from the fish. Instead the fish darted and the slime gathered up on the stick, clinging to anything that bothered to touch it. Standing up, Vincent brought the dripping gob of slime just underneath his nose and took a whiff. His face twisted inward from the pungent stench that crept upward from the slime. Throwing the stick forward, he watched it land on top of the gooey muck with a “plop” and slowly become slurped up by the scum.
Death Count
In a foreign country,
One monkey with a lacerated limb sits on the ground beneath the rainforest canopy.
He is no longer excited by bananas or other monkeys that poke and prod and tease him.
Two scarlet orbs glaze over as he begins to ooze mucus and congeal blood from his other orifices.
Three very curious monkeys climb down the tree to investigate, but after seeing their dead friend, run back up to tell four more monkeys.
Five weeks later,
A team of six men in orange biohazard suits arrive,
to investigate seven groups of dead monkeys.
After eight hours on a plane and nine hours of sleep,
Ten monkeys are brought back in quarantined cargo containers.
Eleven scientists and military personnel spend twelve frantic hours in the operating room.
As lucky as the number thirteen, the virus turns out to be hot.
Fourteen calls are made to the White House, the CDC,
Fifteen news stations find out; sixteen counties in the Virginia/Maryland/DC area are immediately alarmed.
Seventeen safety procedures are drafted; but
in a foreign country,
the death toll rises,
wipes out the total population of one species of monkey,
and goes into hiding
for eighteen years.
Internet Stalker
I’ve hacked computers for as long as I know,
And this time it was a Windows 95 that took the blow.
It belonged to a girl I had met three weeks back,
We had met in Photoshop class; I had showed her my Mac.
I only chatted with her briefly, one day at school,
But that was enough to make me drool.
Unfortunately, she moved away during the semester,
Because her Dad was switching jobs as a corporate investor.
Despite her move, I knew I’d be able to find her on the net,
Hardly anyone else had the name Yvette.
Plus, it is so easy to trace,
Such a bombshell on My Space.
Currently In Control
Damn this Slam,
I’m in a jam.
I have developed writers block;
the words I need are out of stock.
I need to find the trick,
to write something down quick,
so I can make some poetry
that will define my artistry.
To cite; to write: I’m in a plight.
To teach; to preach: I need to reach,
and find a place to concentrate;
so I can begin to articulate.
These ideas trapped in my brain,
are driving me completely insane.
This inability to verbalize,
is the creative writer’s demise.
Luckily all I need is a little rhythm and a pinch of soul;
To get my creative juices back in control.
Backseat Admirer
I’m not going to lie.
I’m bad with directions, and I’ll tell you why.
When I ride in cars, I always look out the side window.
I’ve done it ever since I was too small to ride in the front seat.
It’s just a habit now.
I like to watch the trees rush by,
and see flocks of birds weighing down power lines,
or rest on shivering ponds.
While it is not a happy sight,
I enjoy watching the gradual devolution of pasture
to gravel road to asphalt and then to cement;
mainly because it’s like watching the evolution of a town
to a city, in stop-and-go snapshot form.
In other words, it’s like fast forwarding time or rewinding it;
depending on which direction you are traveling.
On country roads, drivers and walkers wave hello,
and porch sitters share short stories through a simple glance.
If I focus really hard, at stoplights, sometimes I can see ants crawling around
or bees pollinating flowers and trees.
On long road trips, I can watch as gentle slopes ascend into mountains
Or watch piedmont turn to marsh and then to beach fronts.
Now that I can drive, I often go the wrong direction accidentally and get lost;
but the truth is, I don’t care.
I’d rather be watching life continue
then remembering where humans built roads.
Mountains of Love
From my home in
Traveling at sixty miles per hour, with one mountain always in the foreground, the metropolitan area dissipates and is swallowed up by the rising hills of the
Downtrodden tunes of coal miners, Tennessee Whiskey, and white line fever pulse through the car speakers. We are all dispirited for another reason though; Aunt Lillian is broken hearted. It has been about a year since Normie past away, and now, like never before, Aunt Lillian is alone. She has no sight, no hearing, and now, she has no touch; she can no longer feel the love that poured out of Normie every time Normie held her mother’s hand.
We pass through
Aunt Lillian is one of the strongest women in my family. In kindergarten, Normie contracted scarlet fever and was left severely paralyzed. Aunt Lillian must have been very worried that her daughter would not have the opportunities that other children had, because every story I have heard of the mother and daughter, have been nothing but stories of love. There must have been many hard times for Normie growing up, but ultimately, her mother Lillian bent over backwards to make sure her daughter experienced as much as she possibly could.
Aunt Lillian’s husband Emmitt owned and operated a grocery store. From what I have pieced together from her stories, he must have worked most of the time to support his wife and daughter. Aunt Lillian was a very talented woman and an even more talented mother. She used all of her heart and soul to entertain Normie, who could not walk for most of her life.
The house that Aunt Lillian lived in when she was married was a two story house. Like most old homes, the bedrooms were on the top floor of the house. Even in her nineties, Aunt Lillian has the endurance of a work horse. This is because she would carry Normie in her arms up and down the stairs, all their life, until her child was put in a nursing home.
In the summer time Aunt Lillian would set Normie outside in a porch swing or on a shady bench in the garden. They would both listen to records, while Normie enjoyed the good weather and Aunt Lillian painted, wrote poems or made greeting cards with calligraphy. Aunt Lillian even trained her pet parakeet to do circus tricks for Normie.
Normie was very interested in President Eisenhower and made a scrap book of news events. She even got to meet the President and show him her scrapbook of him.
No less than an hour from
We pass over the bubbling McKee’s and Indian Grave Run, which brings up images of Indians and warriors and even more primitive days gone by than that of the Pennsylvanian Dutch. Sitting in the back seat while my parents chat about friends, jobs, retirement, I often drift off from their conversations. I imagine what the area must have been like before the trees and mountains had been dynamited through to build the massive interstate network.
Nearing
Nothing was worth looking at on the drive home.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
The Rebel
In the fall of 2003, my freshman year,
The campus rang with the wild call of the duck. The duck would sound loudest sometime around two or three in the morning, when it could be guaranteed that most of the campus was sleeping. If you stood at Schafer, you could amazingly, still hear the sounds of the duck, which came from the third story fire escape of
It was there, bridge-side that you could find Johnny Rebel, a legend of a man, blowing lovingly into his duck whistles.
Once someone stole Johnny’s duck whistles from his unlocked room. That sent him on a crazed, headlong investigation. Like any real man would do, Johnny posted dozens of Public Service Announcements all over
The next night, at midnight, the wild call of the duck could be heard all across campus.
The only thing Johnny loved more than his duck calls was Pabst. Pabst was not only his beer of choice, but also his pet squirrel. Someone had found Pabst, nearly dead on the lawn of
It’s almost unnecessary to say that Johnny stole the show at the very first Bubba. Of course, all I can remember of the night was helping my friend carry an inebriated Johnny Rebel, supported by our shoulders, home to
Johnny Rebel: he got blamed for many things that year, because he was an alcoholic, Republican redneck. Not the most popular combination on this campus. I like to think that he went out with a bang though… or rather a WHOOSH. One night, in a drunken stupor, Johnny used all of his pissed off might and kicked the water fountain on the first story floor of
Needless to say, Johnny didn’t get invited back the following year.
It’s now been three years since Johnny’s set foot on campus; and I often wonder what has happened to him. Sometimes, when the stars shine bright on the fields of Dogwood and the leaves rustle gently in the woods, I hear the cry of a lonesome duck and then I know… he’s probably doing just fine.
Wednesday's Past
Wednesday night is margarita night. The liquor stores close at 9 pm in the bible belt, so we roll up to Ingles around 10 and buy a bottle of cheap wine: Market Vines strawberry. You can get a big ole jug for only $7.00. And that is how we do Wednesday night, making extra floozy margaritas because they have more sugar in them than alcohol but we both get real drunk and go outside and look for boys to hook up with. Lori’s wearing a bikini top and a skirt and I just have on my hoodie and some jeans. Lori is a lightweight though and they call her Stumbly outside and talk bad shit about her. I can’t get nearly as drunk as her on our half assed margaritas and deep down I know I’ll never be able to pick up boys like she can but I go outside with her anyways because I can’t sleep and she can’t walk. No one is outside though, because it’s a Wednesday night and everyone is doing homework for Thursday. The only kids that are out are the drunks and the druggies and the insomniacs.
We stay out a couple hours; we finish our drinks, Lori and I. I don’t say much of anything because Lori is talking about everything on her mind. Where is the ocean now? Why isn’t it nearby? She just wants to see the waves—she needs her comfort zone. My comfort zone is with people who understand me and that’s why I’m drinking with Lori. Those boys though they break her down inside; they call her a ho. They don’t know how it is though. I tell those boys, why you all gotta be so mean? She’s not crazy… she’s from
Lori’s told me. At first, I thought that she just liked to sleep around too. It took some time, but I learned the truth. She’s just like how I used to be. She thinks she’s ugly. She’s been in a lot of shitty situations with men too and she thinks that she is no good. I tell her, Lori, you are beautiful. You just need to be careful. Someone out there is right for you, but these sketchies on this campus, are not right. Don’t let them get to you.
Lori thinks I’m talking out of my ass, but I know how it is. I know how it is to feel completely alone. I say Lori, listen to me. I am not a whore. You are not a whore, you listen to me. When I was 18, I used to sleep around; but it wasn’t sleeping around. No one called me or found me in school and said hey beautiful, you are so sexy, let’s go screw around in the gym room. That wasn’t me at all. I was so lonely; so damn lonely and I didn’t care about my body. I’d sit up late on the internet. That’s right, I’m one of the sketchies you were worried that I would get abducted by. The thing is though, I wanted to be abducted. I wanted someone to want me, I wanted someone to want my body; and they did. They wanted my body so much that they would meet me anywhere. Those sketchies met me in the backs of parking lots after work or in the middle of the day, they met me at my house when I got good at it. I drove to those sketchies houses and they showed me how sketchy they could be all over my body. One time Lori, one time I met a sketchy at a McDonalds and he took me home in his sketchy white work van and we did sketchy things at his sisters house, in his nephews bed, because he didn’t have a house, but he did have a daughter but she was in school; she was in grade school. And Lori, this one time I drove to a sketchies house and he made me cry.
That was the only time I felt like a whore… the only time. I started crying and I got up and left and I drove home and I showered for like two hours. I don’t even know how many sketchies I’ve slept with… at one point it was sixty something; sixty something moments that I sought affection. Sixty something moments when no one was around to love me back; sixty something moments that I had to convince myself that what I was doing did not make me a whore.
Do you understand what I’m saying Lori? We are not whores. We’re just lonely and we need to be loved, but no one will love us because we are sad and people don’t like to love sad people because they have sketchy problems. And that’s why I’m out here tonight Lori, with this shitty margarita, on this cold April night. I just don’t want you to be alone.
I just don’t want to be alone.A Mother's Bond
Clouds of dust drift upward on the Savanna;
a male hyena waits impatiently in the brush.
A lioness licks her cub,
The air is sharp, like her gaze.
Tumbling playfully in the wild grasses,
the cub wanders after a dung beetle;
While the hyena rushes in for the kill,
The lioness, sensing danger, roars in disbelief,
Pounces, and lands on the side of the hyena
digging her claws into his rump.
The hyena flees, concluding that
mothers are no laughing matter.
The NAMES Quilt
Cloudless day;
Sewing inside.
“Each memorial panel,
must be three feet by six feet”.
The same size as a cemetery plot.
No one ever thinks about the dimensions.
The pattern will fail,
if the shapes don’t fit together.
Our quilt was flawless,
Until a thread got pulled.
Knit One…
Can hardly sew a button.
My hands tremble,
I cut the wedding tux you wore,
And line it with the skirt of my gown.
My Yang for your Yin.
Your tender folds caress me back,
As I wrap myself in you one last time.
Positive Actions: In Haiku
An older sibling,
moved to
to straighten his life.
Three letters stalked him,
Stole his opportunities;
Left him Positive.
They took his license,
job, insurance, apartment;
left him with welfare.
Ailing; three thousand
miles from his home. Struggling
to prolong his time.
Sobbing and heaving
Brother and sister; on the phone.
Alone... he’s dying.
Mother takes the blame;
She must have done something wrong,
Her son is a fag.
“Sister…I need Mom.
I need her to love me too.
Help me convince her”.
She needs exposure.
She must find you on her own;
I cannot force her.
Stuck in between a
homophobic mess; my love
alone is not enough.
Home
Home is where spent my childhood.
It’s where I learned to flat foot and buck dance
and turn sorghum into molasses.
At home all the locals know your name and
what year you won the spelling bee.
Home is where gossip spreads faster than a 5-year-old on a pogo stick.
South of the Mason-Dixon line,
home is where the
It’s where I have lived for eighty-nine years.
Home is where my heart will always rest.
Aqua Butterfly: In Haiku
Small aquarium
Filled with marbles: blue, green, clear,
Bubbler soothes my sleep.
I tap on the glass
And you surface to the top.
Feeding time is nigh.
Beautiful Beta
Glub your way into my heart.
You’re my birthday pet.
Pampered little fish.
Once a week I clean your tank.
Gladly, you accept.
George is your name but
You could be a female
For all I know of fish.
Aqua Butterfly
You make me happy even
Though we can’t cuddle.
Southern Comfort
Polished belt buckles and boots,
Collared shirts and floral skirts;
Hell, even the preacher had a new cowboy hat.
I saw her step onto the longest aisle.
Red bouquet to match her Chevy.
Magnificent; just like the night we met.
I saw her there swinging on the rodeo gate.
Tossing her long curly hair back.
Waving that bright red ten gallon hat
Makin’ such a hoot an’ hollerin’.
I knew she was meant to be mine.
I walked on over to her, trying to contain my nervousness.
Put my boot up on the fence, crossed my arms on the top rung and said the only thing I could think of.
“Well hi thar' purty lady.”
Her smile could have lit a firecracker.
My heart sputtered like a chainsaw on the first pull.
The music began. All eyes were on her.
That aisle would never end.
Eight months of NASCAR races, bull ridin’, comparin, pick ups and gun collections.
Our love was like fried chicken; good every night but especially with a cold beer.
I’ll never forget our first date. Those cows didn’t know what hit em’.
The look on her face when that farmer fired his gun was just perfect.
I proposed at the Daytona 500.
Nothin’ says romancin’ like havin’ “Loretta…Will You Marry Me” flash across the
Jumbo Tron in letters bigger than a John Deer tractor.
By God, people ask me if that was the best county fair of my life. Well, I say...
I do.
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