Month: April 2008

Mood: Stoic
Drinking: Something Pink

Catastrophe Waitress

i.
Lunching with women in ruffled collars
and buckled heels I reveal
far too much
over split pea ravioli.

I am so full of dreams I can
not stop them spilling over
so I ask for the check
to regain my restraint
and holster my smoking tongue.

ii.
No matter what she says,
I cannot think it anything but cruel
to divulge dreams of childbirth
to a woman whose womb
is a minefield.

She sips her Diet Coke, extra ice,
with what should pass for nonchalance
and says her body is slippery
and far too dangerous. “Even
the rats have abandoned ship.”

Attempts at wry rodent humor
are not a good sign.

Very few people follow up a miscarriage
with abortion. But she is
a condemned building in which
no one can be allowed to live
and here I come
banging down the door
bringing torture cupcakes.

iii.
Attracted by the attention
the local paper has brought
to the dead heads of stuffed game
that decorate the walls, we visit
the new place on G Street
to sample pancakes and controversy.

You position the stroller so
he has the best view of the room
but laden with milk, he sleeps
right through breakfast, oblivious
to the glassy brown gaze
of taxidermied antelope
who dream of lost safari fields,
ghost limbs twitching.

-Lo, who is now twitching for pancakes.

Mood: Tired
Drinking: Soon

Sorority Sister #2

This is the part where
the entire theater screams,

“Look behind you!”
but you remain deaf

and ever so doomed.
The End inches closer

with every baited breath.
They’re numbering your

screen time in seconds.
You’re not going to be

the final girl, the one
who puts up plucky fists

and fights. You’re not even
going to extend the inevitable

by running, spilling your screams
into the eager, waiting night.

Your part’s only filler –
everyone knows the real hero

is the killer. Time to
turn and face the blade.

-Lo, who doesn’t even know where that one came from.

Mood: Rushed
Drinking: Diet Coke

Bloodlust

I’m not asking you
to fall on a sword
to prove your affection
but

once in awhile
a little jealousy
wouldn’t hurt, you know
just

enough green
to indicate your
heart’s really in this
and

keeps is what
you’re playing for.
So

I’m not asking you
to fall on a sword
but

once in awhile a knife
or small dagger would do
not often
but

enough for me
to know you really
feel it
enough

for you to press
me to your lips
and

stop the bleeding.

-Lo, getting all abstract on your ass.

Mood:
Drinking:

Happily Ever After

Only in America
do people expect to be happy.

It’s in our constitution
to demand pleasure
or at least the pursuit of it.

We want our picket fences
and chocolate cake, too.

We want not just true love
but unending adoration
with some instant gratification
on the side.

We want to make a difference
by making ourselves feel better.

We want to save the world
with shopping malls.

Elsewhere, success is survival.

But in the land of the
buy one get one free
we are not satisfied
until we are famous.

And even then we want more,
now,
again.
again.
again.

-Lo, running so late.

Mood: Stonewalled
Drinking: Diet Dr. Pepper

Honey

Farm girls take pride in slivers and dirt.
In hot blistered palms.
In the ability to run barefoot
down a long gravel drive
without wincing once,
callouses hardened like leather,
borne like beauty marks.

Each summer when the white clover bloomed,
the bobblehead flowers
swarming the backyard with sweetness,
I greeted the season by stripping off shoes,
leaving them lay where they fell
until August.

Neither heat nor humidity
nor mosquitoes could detract
from the sweaty joy of long yellow days
unbroken by school bells
unmarred by the frantic buzz
of city girls applying lip gloss and
passing judgment.

Stings were inevitable.
Honey bees working the clover for
nectar were often surprised by the crush
of my wild naked foot. Whether
offended or frightened, a stinger
was the unanimous solution.
But farm girls take pride in pain.

Feeling the prick, I’d drop to the ground
and pull up a sole for inspection.
With a dull grubby fingernail doubling
as blade, I’d scrape the venom sac free,
just like Dad taught me. Then I’d hunt
for the warrior bee, curled and dying alone
in the grass beneath the clothesline,
too far from her queen for comfort.

Do bees dream of honey when they fade?
I’m still curious. And though I didn’t want
the last thing she saw to be the face
of the enemy, unfelled by the strike
that gutted her, I’d whisper a question
unintelligible to insect ears. “But aren’t you glad
you were never a drone?”

-Lo, who finds it painful to post a poem that needs polishing.

Mood: Cold
Drinking: Diet Dr. Pepper

Body Double

I have sex dreams
about my first-grade boyfriend.

In the dreams, he appears
as neither a first-grader
or my boyfriend,

nor does he bear any resemblance
to his high-school self
that rakish punk
in Vision Streetwear
who laughed and said “Never”
when asked if he’d go out with me,
not knowing
I was passing by the classroom
at that exact moment
and overheard the whole thing.

He doesn’t look like
his current self, either.
There is no tattoo sleeve,
no vermilion mohawk,
no vestige of the sullen man
he has become.

In dreams exist
what could have been
but never was
and shows up now
only to remind me
that waking life is better.

-Lo, taking liberties with adjectives.