The Poetry Marathon

I wish I could play satin host
to hungry Dylan and peckish Smith
and prepare a multi-continent feast
in drawers just like they paid to pull.

To hungry Dylan and peckish Smith
would I offer culinary delights
in drawers just like they paid to pull
when Cassavetes was just around the corner.

Would I offer culinary delights
if the Asbury options permitted
when Cassavetes was just around the corner
and Timothy Carey played Solitaire in the back booth,

but lost to the pocket of his wife’s jacket.
Silk traps more rings than satin
when Cassavetes was just around the corner
and no one’s dreams were in sepia at windmill pace.

If the Asbury options permitted,
my guests would be served it with history cakes
and no one’s dreams were in sepia at windmill pace
like a State Fair souvenir.

Silk traps more rings than satin
but on windy days, no one’s begging
like a State Fair souvenir
for the quarters lodged in mid-century slots.

You’ve got no nerve to walk down this street
at night, but you know someone who did –
and phoned the cops
when he passed a man carrying a machete
on his way to the Avenue.

Why don’t you scream it
that you’ve been waiting on the same bus
that’s not going to take you
anywhere you planned on going.
If my grandmother were alive
during Covid and living off Truman still,
she’d be captive and when you got her going,
you’d know you pissed off the wrong woman.

But there’s nothing really to turn on
except a hydrant on a day so hot
you could fry an egg on the sidewalk,
but the wrong people need all the comforts
and the veneer of pity coats Admiral in
tents and wrinkled green plastic bags approximating the same
when the force shows up to haul away their makeshift village.

Makes it all seem so cruel that
someone – not anyone who could afford to cash it in –
bought the winning Powerball
that was sold at the gas station that serves
as a waystation to the denizens of a part of town
people call home for
its proximity to an intersection to hold a sign.

The last of the fires had been extinguished
and we had left the books required
to teach the flock.
We had dinner in a haze
but asked the crustaceans
for forgiveness before
pouring butter
over their boiled shells
and the meat
before stabbing
at our plates.

Over coffee and dessert,
we begged mercy
for the labor
required to harvest the wheat,
to grown and pluck the beans,
to smelt the silver for the dinnerware,
and the women to bear the laborers
who served our courses.

Who were we but God-fearing Patriots?

Gasps of organic matter stand frail sentry
in your doorways.
Willow wisps, meadow grass, chuffed wheat stalks, prairie blades
in every color known to Pantone
are referenced by your hosts.
All of your agents are thanked
and all of your rooms explored
no matter how similar.
These studies in skeletal flora
occupy molten pots heavy enough to be moveable only by Hercules
at pivot doors that reach the sky,
and we are hushed as we enter.
Rooms that will never be inhabited are set
as though for an episode of a late ’90s dramatic series
in which every girl wore plum brown lipstick and
every boy ran his hands through his hair
to indicate concern.
Still, there’s no lack of effect
in how unaffected every element in its undone-ness is.
For all its impenetrability,
– with its home theater, its bathrooms that outnumber its bedrooms, and its panic room –
the structure might as well be a dandelion.

D______ was glamorous, P____ was silly
and one was my mother,
who hovered between
D’s edginess and
P’s harmlessness.

But, she was still
the one
who spent a year
at a school
for wayward girls.

I was in my teens
and not on any troublemaking path
when she told me the story of her youth.

She had been truant one day
past the limit,
and even though she hadn’t done anything
that she was caught for, a marked vehicle
was waiting for her
when she got home
that night.

My mother cried and begged
my grandmother, a stoic woman
from rural Missouri,
who told her
she had to follow the guards
if she wanted to ever be allowed
to come home.

Only a year or two
after she was released,
my mother, after graduation,
found a part-time job
at a photography lab;
it was during this time,
she began dating my father.

She probably thought, as
did he,
she’d be his golden bird
before she later grasped
there’s nothing golden
in containment.
Even if it was of her own volition.

Before you say my name,
let me tell you how much
I love your new haircut,
and I agree with you
that farting in bed,
especially in winter
and you let me under the big cover,
is BAD.

And, I love you
so much I let you be
the bigger person here.
I didn’t bark
as if to say, “What? Why are you home
so early?”
I just looked at you
square in the eye
to let you know how much
I deserve to be told
to get off the table
(even though it is
a much better vantage point
to keep guard over that back window)
and because I love the sound of
your voice. Especially
when you say my name,
or the word “treats.”

If my love is enough
for you,
then you’ll just wipe
off the table
and let me sleep in your lap
while you watch
Stranger Things.

A couple wandering the streets of Spain,
a mother whose daughter is keeping a strange creature in her room,
and a trio who bicycled across Asia
all seen while I sat in the dark
in rooms of varying occupancy
at an underground film festival.

Talking with other critics
waiting out the screening intermission
between the two parts of Che
at the old Tivoli.

Stepping out of Last
Temptation of Christ
and immediately fainting
to the amazement of my date.

Seeing Taxi Driver on TV
when I was a kid
with my parents at one
of their friends’ homes, and going to their bathroom
to take off
and stuff into my purse the bra that I wasn’t used to.

Not being sure what just happened twice
(but everyone in the theater being likewise taken aback):
Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

Seeing Roadrunner at the Armour
with Ron; it was our first movie since/during COVID
and everyone wore masks.

Each morning, I orchestrate an array of multivitamins
from a kitchen counter graced with a frame containing a 1983 postcard image
of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and a travel book to Spain.

After swallowing the roughly half a dozen supplements,
I quake down to my knees and go through floor exercises
meant to improve my aging balance on this troubled plain.

Most days, I occupy listening to well-off women with highly self-regarded
opinions opine on why they want what they don’t need
as long as they can get it at cost just to test my restraint.

Other days, I live on the wild side and plan where I’d go
if the world did become a land of biters. Whichever zombie movie
comic this apocalypse looks like is lined, but still not painted.

Some days, I ask for nothing but quiet and a story to read
that doesn’t make me sorry for getting out of bed.
Gratitude was my least favorite exercise, but it’s keeping me sane.

The mouse I haven’t been able to induce
to nibble from the poison blocks I deposited in the dark
crevices of the back apartment skips out of earshot
as I talk back at the phone text I send to the woman
who insists on taking everything I utter as insult.

“Meant that as a joke,” I text back when
she takes on herself to reiterate her original plaint,
a decidedly not serious one, but perhaps meant as conciliatory
for her previous day’s reply to my text informing her of a
local protest in support of something we both believe.

“Thanks for the info.” And a thumbs-up. And, no “love you” back.

I loathe Hallmark movies, but I find myself envying how
masterfully their writers wraps up the jangled resentments
and misperceptions shared by a mother and daughter.

There is no deus ex machina like a heart issue, but life isn’t a movie
and past hurts and recriminations, never forgotten or forgiven, fester in the wires
of every phone call.

I’m not a terrible daughter. She’s not a terrible mother.
We just have script disagreements.

I keep a jar of Maxwell house coffee that I’ve yet to open
and never intend to, unless in case of emergency.

The coffee serves a talismanic purpose, reminding me of
my grandmother, who brewed a cup every morning before
taking a bus from her shotgun-style house off Truman Rd
to her job sewing graduation gowns and funeral shrouds
for a company that, like all that muslin, has disappeared.

After retirement, she soon moved to another house,
one rented to her by by aunt, but still drank her one
cup of instant Maxwell every morning before switching
to iced tea and water for the remainder of the day.

I keep the jar, in case of emergency, and I may open it one
morning before going to my own factory.