Her Maiden Voyage
She reads her way
through the days
of her fifteenth summer,
alternating
between Austen
and yard sale,
throbbing-member
romances that cause her hair to stick
to the back of her neck.
His love letter,
when it finally comes,
is no surprise. It is supposed to be like this
between men
and women, she thinks,
ignoring grammatical errors
and the lack of poetic prose.
"He is mad for me—simply mad!"
But she dreams
of dulcet verse and teacup roses.
The nights
of her fifteenth summer
are devoted to the art
of French kissing
and pondering why it is
there are no fireworks
nor cannon blasts,
pounding rhythms, cymbal crashes, earth shudders,
or at the very least —
bells
with muffled clappers.
She is poked, dry prodded. Quizzed,
but never quite tested.
She notes the lack of music in these rapid
oral examinations,
as if her mouth is a dangerous cave
and he only dares venture to stick in an arm.
Once, his tongue made contact with her teeth
and he wrenched away in violent shudders
that caused him to blush and stammer
his gratitude
for a thing she cannot fathom lying hollow
and parched—a puckered Jack-O-Lantern
on November sixth,
nothing more than a hatchery for spiders.
There is more than this,
not all the books lie, she hopes,
forming layers
of wax while she waits
and reads,
waits and reads,
waits and reads
until the words become
dead language.
The wax hardens then,
under countless yellow moons
spent exploring
the satin insides of masculine cheeks,
tickling the roofs of ice-cubed mouths,
and suckling
heated tongues thickened by Eros.
The act of love itself
is of no importance
compared with the intimacy of breathless kisses,
but she knows this interval will never, can
never
be
more than temporary.
So she crawls way from dusk on skinned knees
and seeks the sun
to better read
the popsicle-stained pages.
Words are words are words are words
in the end, and at last,
in the light,
the warm light of release,
her shell begins to crack and run.
She smiles; she laughs.
The fruit of the walnut is sweet,
ever more potent
than even the best of the books described.
Oxidant (for Julie)
There is a great, hulking,
yellow
cube van across the road
with a rust-eaten hood and
toothy grill grin.
There are mouse holes just
above its headlights;
you can see clear in to the
wires of the distributor cap.
Field mice sleep on the engine
block to stave off frost,
reminding me (for some disquieting
reason)
of your grandmother; she
forgets my name, always has,
but remembers my phone number
when a light bulb goes out
in the ceiling fixtures. She calls me
Trixie. I know that she's being cheeky,
(and she knows that I know
—
she never did like me)
but I answer to it
assuaging the guilt that comes
from still possessing enough youth
to shimmy up a ladder.
This is something new:
she keeps dead mums in a waterless
vase on top of the piano.
Blood-rusted and gnawed.
The door hinges need oil.
Do the mice change the headlights for the trucker? Do you s'pose he knows?
Pretends not to? Or
is it like the Shoemaker and
the Elves; I hope it is.
If only you lived closer.
Come home.
I’ll bring cheese and
we’ll picnic
on Nana's good tablecloth.
(
- Published first in Bohemian Rag, April 2004)
Elsie
Cardoza
Elsie
Cardoza walks
the fifteen blocks from work to home,
head
bent against the wind in winter,
beads
of sweat that fall and burn the eyes in summer.
Elsie
Cardoza walks; five days a week
fifty
weeks a year.
Covered
in lint and fabric fuzz from
the
blouses she stitches.
Sleeves in pastel linens and garish cottons.
Stitch
after stitch after stitch...
Eight
hours a day,
five
days a week,
fifty
weeks a year.
Elsie Cardoza stops
at
Fonseca’s Market
to
buy the codfish she’ll cook tonight for Joe
and
the kids.
She
hates cod, prefers haddock,
but
Joe likes it and she must fry it with
the
same spices his mother used in the old country.
Joe is her husband, and that, as they say,
is
that.
She
will cook it, they will eat it,
and
no one
will tell her that it was good,
or
bother to thank her, or think to clean up.
Elsie Cardoza will wash and dry the mountain of greasy dishes
stacked
on the counter waiting for her.
It’s a nice counter though; faux-granite, Joe installed it himself—just for
her.
Dish
after dish after dish ...
Seven
days a week,
fifty-two
weeks a year.
She
will stay up, long after
Joe and the kids go up to bed.
Elsie
will mend Joe’s shirts, make up his lunch
for
tomorrow.
She will fold the newspaper, empty the ashtrays,
and
iron her daughter Jennifer’s clothes.
Because Jen must have pin-straight creases
and after all, what is a mother
for
if not to please her family.
Elsie Cardoza cries
when
everyone is sleeping.
She
cries because her fingers cramp;
they crack and bleed
in thin, crisscrossed lines,
her
ankles swell, and Elsie Cardoza is tired.
Twenty-four
hours a day,
seven
days a week,
fifty-two
weeks a year.
© 2002
(—2nd place winner in
the 2005 Poets Out of Hiding Contest
sponsored by the Narrows Center of the Arts )