Pasta Putanesca

 

Olives are easy

to come by, tomatoes plump

in everyone’s garden, whole streets

green smelling from the abundance.

Semolina and water - bella bella bella.

All of it easy, fast, cheap. Quick nourishment

for a long night.

Imagine her, round of hip and thigh,

dark- haired and sarcastic-eyed.

Her mouth (maybe full

and red as her tomatoes,

maybe pressed into an irritated

line like the capellini) twitches

while she remembers her mother

making the same dish.

How long to chop the cup of olives? How long

to toss in four juicy Romas, an onion,

a few leaves of basil?

No longer than a john, no faster than her

skill in the sheets: a gentle stirring there,

a quick toss into boiling heat,

out he comes and onto the next big thing.

What sends me to bed,

dozy with sugar in the head,

unfocused and rose-colored,

is burned off in an hour

with her energetic sex.

How better, then, to sustain a body?

 

 

 

Summer’s Finest Fruit

 

I am a slut

for nectarines, sun-yellow,

dripping, honey-mouthed, down my throat.

That luscious lick of juice dripped onto my wrist,

unbelievable surprise of fruit that tastes like a poem

(some Grecian ode to Athena) something

we should all race for, golden as an apple

or a kiss. This

should not be allowed in public!

I long to pry the flesh from the stone,

smear my chin as with a buttercup, but wet

as my husband’s mouth, sweet and tart

as a nip on the tongue, a prelude

to slow sex or sticky hands.

 

 

 

Tasting Strawberries

 

“I wanted to write a poem

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me If you can’t understand it?”

-William Carlos Williams

 

Forget the inequities of education, and your father

refusing to render the tenderness due your mother

who’s forgotten the debt and your name.

Instead, let’s mourn something tangible

to the deep Earth and her fading bounty,

the length and breadth of our irresponsibility.

Mother, let’s you and I mourn strawberries.

Remember the white muslin sundress you made

when I was a baby, and its red fruit buttons.

The creeping vine, weaving through backyard

grass and clover, Don’t Eat That sudden rushes

to toddlers fascinated by the uncultivated ruby excess.

Mourn the mesh-covered mess of berries not eaten

before the jays or robins, the drunkards, flew

away with our home-grown jewels in their beaks.

Together, we will reclaim the language of loss.

To regain any semblance of the of the old fruits,

you say, it’s impossible even to buy plants.

Taste is trained out of the very seeds themselves,

of tongue on fruit, fingers stained cerise with juice

the surprising pop of skins, the quick crimson pulp.

Remember the first proud harvest of Sparkles,

and losing the ready roundness of Ozark Beauties,

the hybridization of our sturdy Nor’ Eastern sweeties.

Your strawberries taught the rest what to be.

Remember their honey sweetness, their small redness.

Remember for me. Tell me all about them.

Strawberries have lost their taste,

and it is inconsequential and it is true

Mother, and it is small and it is nothing.

At last, we’ve agreed on something.

 

 

 

Resignation Letter

I am Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.

“I am angry” he says.

He was naked in the tub with Julia Roberts’ legs

and his father was unforgiven.

 

“I am angry” I say,

and this causes the darkness

under my eyes. This causes the wrinkles

in my subconscious, like how I dream

my boss stupidly drives his car off

a bridge every Wednesday night

and I wake up glad.

I will not pay a shrink

to learn how to say “angry”,

unlike Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.

I will write everything for free and force feed it

to my boss’s eyes, where he’ll remain untouched

and say how great my boobs looked

when I was nursing, and I’ll wish I could also

afford to do yoga and be a raging ass-hat

because I feel lost and scared and wonder

how my life ended

without my death.

I’m not always Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.

Sometimes I am Julia Roberts when she struts

into the hotel lobby with a blonde wig on

because getting fucked can be good

money if you’re not yourself. I want to cry

and say that the ladies laugh

when I tell them what my salary is

and what I do to earn it, so I can’t

afford to buy adulthood for our fancy dinner

but there are no excuses

in management’s world,

not even poverty.

Sometimes I am that shitty lawyer

played by Jason Alexander and I know just

how to clock a whore in the mouth

to shut her up before I stick it to her real good.

Today, I am myself and Richard

does not believe that I am only good for fucking,

and the shop girls that made Julia Roberts cry

remind me of my boss, and he can kiss my ass.

I quit.

 

 

 

Resumé Cover Letter

 

Take me out of myself, or put me back.

I can’t see who I am.

I’ve gotten too close,

or too far away -

I’ve lost track of what I’m about.

Maybe I’ve never known.

This sounds familiar.

Maybe I’ve thought this my whole life,

and only now,

when I’m convinced

I should know the answer

to the question, does it sound alien.

My mother’s voice haunts me

on nights when the moon has a corona

of deep-valley fog held high like threats.

“I’m a jack of all trades, really. I’m not good at any one thing.”

Christ help me,

I can’t live like that.

One thing’s

all I can damn well handle.

 

 

 

Termination

 

She wrote and wished me peace

and happiness and wanted

to keep in touch.

I wanted to know

why her husband’s family

doesn’t know my husband’s

family. Why don’t they know

that he sells catfish from a rotten shack

in a soybean field where my husband’s

grey and crumpled mother lays dying

on grey and crumpled nursing home sheets

in a bed next to a window

that looks out on the land his father sold

to pay the bills?

I’ve told her this a thousand times.

How do I say

the human things, the words

that will tell her I have not

forgotten humiliation

at her hands or my own,

that doubt and worry

still lavender my dreams?

This is so urbane,

the desire to tell off one’s boss,

but also there is the desire to say

“I don’t hate you

because you are not

Rwanda or the Israel/Palestine

conflict. You are not the Mississippi

delta where whole families die from winter

in shotgun houses with no doors. You are not

my students who ache for so many reasons.”

This is the question

I’ve had and the thing I needed

to say when she told me

my termination was non-negotiable.