|
Spring 2008
VanBuren's picks:
Antonia Clark
Brad Johnson
Dale McLain
Roger Pfingston
Richard Rippon
John Anderson
Cristina Baptista
Cynthia Brackett-Vincent
Michael Brownstein
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Alison Eastley
Brent Fisk
David Fraser
Krikor der Hohannesian
Amy MacLennan
Lisa Markowitz
Damon McLaughlin
Micki Myers
Roger Pfingston
Heather Schimel
Rachel Stewart
Lafayette Wattles
Matt Alberhasky
Margaret Fieland
Robert Johnson
Willie Smith
Alex Nodopaka
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Patrick Carrington
Download is still free.
|
|
M
Winter 2008
The Weedy Heart of the Junkyard: Doris Holbrook Speaks
(in response to Cherrylog Road by James Dickey)
Off Highway106
at Cherrylog Road I entered
the junkyard the way kudzu creeps,
walloping the wrench against
my palm like Papa’s strop
on my skin. He wasn’t the only one
who could make a wreck of things.
The headlight on the ’34 Ford
pried loose like nylon panties
off a twenty-dollar trollop. I’d dangle
that bait in front of Papa later,
though I doubted he’d ever see much
beyond what he believed
were Mama’s eyes, yellow-flecked
and brazen. Our barn rose from the fields
on a sea of car parts like an ark on the wrath
of God. It seemed the looser I turned
those screws, the tighter Papa twisted.
James could wait, climbing in and out
of abandoned chassis like a boy
unable to decide which ugly girl
might be so grateful for his invitation to dance,
she’d give it up in the backseat afterwards.
Did he think I wouldn’t choke
on the bovine smell of leather?
James afforded the liberation of romance
like he coveted motorcycles -- every radiator
cap became a kingsnake, every grandmother
a lady chauffeured by a colored driver,
in an exhausted compost where even the sensible
copal trees had packed their trunks and lit
off to Brooklyn like Mama and that rake
with the manicured hands.
I’d hitch my yearnings to the tailpipe
of his imaginings, pray one of those yarns
might possess the tensile strength
to tow me uncut through acres of jagged
windshields. He’d hold me and hold me,
Doris Holbrook, Doris Holbrook
revving inside the engine of his mouth,
as if identifying make and model
could manufacture more than just a vehicle.
My oiled hand was all it took
to coax pacts from him
we’d both believe until they’d fall
flat as a blacksnake after the mouse
has been digested. Scabs bred by the hooks
of popped-through seat springs
or farmer’s strops bleed the same.
He’d tear off up Highway 106 while I’d pretend
to amble down Cherrylog Road, double-back
to rip sparkplugs from an Essex’s soul,
and lie in wait for the Second Coming
in the back of a blue Chevrolet.
Interrupted
I belly into bed after you, conform
my breasts to your back; my fingers
like scouts plot a course to the crease
in the hollow where ribcage ceases, before hip
lifts like a bridge. What? Oh, I used the word
bridge because it is a masculine construct,
and hips, male hips or a woman’s obsession
with them, sounds heretical. Only women
have hips, good hips for child-bearing, they say;
even Clifton knew it was all in the span.
Most men, if they have hips at all, would rather
not be reminded of them. This aberrant desire
of my fingers for your hip is one more chagrin
in a long line of embarrassments you are made
to endure. You see, there is a fold there,
a deep furrow of flesh where my immigrant
lips will soon follow to build settlements,
till berries that bloom out of season. Hmm?
No berries, I know, too feminine – corn then,
I guess. Yes? Corn. Is that a more mannish
sounding crop? Ok, I’ll concede the phallic
symbolism is over the top.
Irksome questions are another in that long line
of annoyances you receive in exchange
for your vows like a free gift with purchase
you have no use for. Women come
packaged with gratuitous questions.
All right, just one more. Do you think
the reason they do not lay husband
and wife together in the same plain
box is that after flesh has fallen away,
skeletons would pivot, break ground,
pelvis searching spine, making mockery
of eternal rest? No? The conceit has been
completely dropped, not to mention it dares
to judge for the reader. But even God punted
the parable, kicked the metaphor to speak
in simple judgmental statements occasionally –
Thou shalt not, and all that. Which, by the way,
if he’d chosen to call them General Guidelines,
might not be so tempting to break. You stare
at me like you did at that troublesome mug,
gone astray somewhere at the back of a cabinet,
the one you were forced to drag home
with your new stainless steel DeLonghi
coffee maker, and then you say,
with your last two words of the 7,000
men are allotted to use each day –
fuck me.
What widows know that no one else does
If you had not died right
in the middle of our marriage,
the man who now calls himself
husband and I would still have bumped
elbows in the Starbucks on 12th Avenue,
forced to share the only empty
table, moved to stir confidences
like spoons in our coffee.
I would have sipped the musk
of his collarbone through a straw,
ridden the rise of his hip
in the half-light of rainy
Thursday afternoons.
He would have known the cruelty
of loving what was not his; I,
the heft of my breast in his hand
before running home to beg your fingers
untangle strands of copper
lightning from my hair, smelling
of ozone after a thunderstorm.
Like children drunk on the wine
of summer, we three would have climbed
too high up, too far out on the limb
of a different inevitability.
You say Choose. I uncurl
my fingers from the branch.
 |
M is an Administrator for an online poetry site and labor of love called Wild Poetry Forum. Her work has appeared in a variety of e-zines -- Pedestal, Gumball Poetry Journal, Half-Drunk Muse, Word Riot, three candles, 3rd Muse Poetry Journal, Eclectica Magazine, and others – and has received a Pushcart nomination. She has also served as an Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection for the past eight years. In the few seconds a month when she is not working on these projects, she reads mostly novels, walks along bustling city streets with her man, and is grateful for the enormous amount of love in her life. |
|
|
