Poetry Gong - Poem 24

Let’s Be Blood Sisters


No sweeter words
will ever pour
from the porcelain cup
of third grades’ most popular girl.
In her perfectly pleated plaid pants
and J.C. Penney sweater vest
she is a tea party with tiny cakes,
the slight hole in the piñata,
the first lick
up the cold side
of an Eskimo pie.

You have no fear
of knives,
..........(Friends for life.)
scissors,
..........(Just you and me.)
needles
or pins.
..........(Our secret club.)
You do not cry
..........(Do you want to?)
when you scrape your knee,
when the bike skids
out from under you,
when the swing kicks
you flat on your back.
..........(Yes or no?)

You’d never be caught
dead in a plaid skirt.
Your sweaters wrap
round you like a blanket,
hang past your knobby wrists.
You can’t remember today
if she spoke your name yesterday.
Has she ever breathed
your whole name through
lips thin as spun sugar?

You love the pouch of her cheeks
the gaze of her too-wide eyes
more than the sting of hot lunch
alone at the empty lunch table,
more than the weight of
a whisper on your flaming ears.

There is blood enough for everyone,
pour yours in a tea cup,
toast your good fortune.

The End of the Rainbow in the Tip of a Cigarette: Poetry Gong #5

Christine over at Balanced on the Edge just wrote a letter poem in response to Jo's (Florescence) poem on poverty. From these two poems, I was inspired to write the piece below, about my fascination with a neighbor family in my hometown. They were a loud house, a full house, a messy, smelly house. I loved them.

****************************************************************************
Dear Christine,

When old Unk lit his hand-rolled
cigarette on the sagging wood porch,
the whole clan pulled up a step.
This was the family with the kids who ate
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bread flopping
in time with shoe-less feet up and down the sidewalk.

Up and down the sidewalk my mother cried,
apron flying behind her one summer afternoon.
I’ve lost my daughter. I’ve got her bologna
with the crust cut off waiting on a plate
in our kitchen. Have you seen her? She never thought
to stop at the neighbor’s where the children took meals to go.

Whiskered stump of a man, Unk rarely spoke.
A smoking Buddha, wrapped in paper-thin plaid
and tattered polyester slacks. Uncle, grandfather,
brother, father all jammed into one man, into one house.
His tobacco stink wrapped its brown arms around
you, pulled you in like moth to flame.

My mother once told me how she and her sister
were the only kids who smelled like a barn.
Now she relishes her daily showers, bastes her body
in Jean Nate, dusts herself in Love’s Babysoft.
She is a garden, the fistful of dandelions on the neighbor’s table
next to my half-eaten bowl of cold Spaghettios.

NaPoWriMo #25

On Reading the Poems of a Popular Asian-American Poet, the Northern New York Poet Laments Her Roots

I did not have an exotic
childhood. It was not spicy.
It was not saucy, raw,
or sensual. In many ways
it was a soft and white slice
of American bread,
the flour and water kind
sheet and blanketing bologna.
Holly Hobbie sheets were pulled
up and nylon threaded bed spreads flicked
mid-air every morning after cereal
white with skim milk, pale
canned pears sliced into moons.
Long yellow buses swallowed
wan cotton children whole,
belched them back
up the cement walkways
of lonesome schools named for ghosts.
What did I know
of foreign or domestic?
Spice was deadly salt,
sprinkled over ears of white kernel sweet corn.
Sauce was sallow gravy
poured over potatoes piled high as snow drifts.
It was not an exotic childhood
unless you were from Africa
or India, China or the equator.
Then all that virgin
white might frighten you.
You might choke
on the blinding blandness.
Wish you knew
at least one word for snow.

****************************************************************************

From the time I first read Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros, I have wanted to be anything but a German/Scottish/English/American girl from the semi-frozen northeast New York. I worried that I had no crazy Tias, no fortune-telling abuela, nothing exotic or even remotely spicy in my past. NOw that I'm older, I still lament my mostly boring family history, but I have learned to dig a little deeper, and to make up stuff.

Come to think of it, before all this, when I was about seven, I used to tell people I was really adopted and my real parents were gypsies. Hmmm....

NaPoWriMo #19 - Keep the Prose Poems Coming!

Thirteen Frames, and We’re Not Bowling

There is a wall of me in the house I grew up in. Thirteen frames from birth to death. Well, from three to high school, but what, really, is the difference? There’s the day I posed for the slick young photographer who got his jollies arranging the leotarded legs of preschool tap-dancers. There’s the smart-ass not-quite-teenager who just had sex last summer. There’s the white jade frog my half-brother gave me for Christmas. He bought it from a traveling Catholic school kid selling trinkets out of a cardboard suitcase. Lucky we have that one on film. The middle school girl-bully threatened my cat and my mother if I didn’t let her wear that for her seventh grade school picture. Wait. That’s her necklace. I never owned a frog in my life. I did, however, lie still on the twin bed at the lake one summer, counting frog croaks and mourning the passing of my twelve-year-old youth. The summer before the fall I turned teenager. Thank god for family photographs. Everyone should have a wall of me.

****************************************************************************

This was inspired by Christine at This Is All Your Fault. She has a great prose poem with framed things. Go. Read it. You'll be glad you did.

American Pillow Book

Things I Have Forgotten

The smell of my grandmother’s orange sweater.
The taste of homemade soup.
How it feels to have my hair split
into six sections, three on each side,
pulled tight and twisted,
pulled tight and twisted.
How to make chili relejos.
The proper temperature for heating oil.
The heat of the moment.
The fire of a foreign tongue sliding across my teeth.
The names of all the Italian soccer players
who fell in love with the girls from America,
all seven of us, pale, blond, fading
in the stale airport air.
How to travel alone.
How to memorize a three-minute jazz dance.
Where my feet belong when I am standing
in a long, long line.
When to stop listening.
Who first told me I am beautiful.
The smell of my first perfume.
The first Christmas my father didn’t buy
my mother new underwear.
The embrace of my first bra.
How it feels
to do something for the first time.


***


There was a wildly imaginative list poem up at This Is All Your Fault yesterday. Turns out it was based on a pillow book, a traditional, still popular Japanese form. That reminded me of a book I read when I was pregnant with my first child. It was by a young Japanese author and it was full of lists. I had great plans for my own list poems, then I had a baby, I had another, I lost some brain cells, I forgot about list poems. Boy, am I glad I remembered. They're very freeing. Very inspiring.

PS: You should buy Christine's books. They're great.