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October 28, 2007
1.
I’d just about settled into my seat, my gaze fixed at the gray-green highway blur outside the window when the guy next to me started talking about Joanne. Joanne had ovarian cancer; Joanne disliked the taste of Jerusalem artichokes; Joanne blamed herself for the death of her alcoholic father. He held in his hands a plaid flannel handkerchief that was unravelling in one corner. Soft threads wiggled out from the weave, and he pulled at them with cracked fingernails. Joanne, he said, had only recently discovered the beauty of waking up just before dawn, before the day’s silence is ruined by the pushy clang of other people’s needs. The bus slowly turned on a curved ramp over a parking lot next to the river. I watched orange light bounce off the windshields of cars.
2.
Leonard. His name was Leonard. He cried the way men do, dry and silent. We held hands as we crossed over the wide, flat middle of the country. I told him about Marcus, the neighborhood we’d lived in, the crumbling brick warehouse we’d made our home. I told him about the twenty-foot ceilings, the industrial heater that hung over the door, a steel guardian that slumbered until we prodded it with a broomstick. And then I told him the story. I told him. Marcus had been riding his bicycle on Delavan Street after dark when a car smashed into him. I never knew who it was. I never knew. I was eating leftover mashed potatoes from an old coffee mug when the police rang the bell. He was half a block from our building, his beautiful skull smashed.
3.
In Kearney, outside of an Arby’s, I watched a hamburger wrapper tumble over the grass at the side of the road while Leonard moved down the aisle with his handkerchief. I waved to him from the window, my forehead pressed against the glass, but he had already turned his back. The bus lurched from its parking space. Next to me, the orange and red striped seat gaped, empty. Over the hum of the motor I heard someone’s teeth snap against their fingernails.
4.
I bled into a stainless steel toilet in a rest stop in Salt Lake City. Two feet on the other side of the door asked, gently, if I was all right and I nodded, forgetting that no one could see my flushed face, knees to elbows, mourning. Black grout between the floor tiles formed right angles, hundreds of them. Women shuffled from stall to sink, sink to door, and the door groaned in protestation. I don’t know how long I was there, perched, guarding the end of some kind of life. I wrung out my underwear in the sink. A young woman with an infant watched me buy three sanitary napkins from the machine. Outside the bus depot the light was bleak, the sky streaked an ashen gray. I thought about Leonard crossing that parking lot under the green cast of the fluorescent lights. Goodbye, I said. I thought it. I closed my eyes.
5.
A kid with headphones over his baseball cap told me that the last bus was leaving in two hours. I wiped the sweat from my lip and sat on the curb to wait.
Filed by frances at October 28th, 2007 under prose poems
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October 21, 2007
Antipasto
He leaned into her, his thumb resting in the crease of her jeans, index finger teasing a belt loop. Her lips tasted of cinnamon chewing gum and something dull and salty, like french fries.
Primi
A stack of unopened mail sat perkily next to her mother’s magazines on the coffee table. Behind the couch, air pushed the curtains around.
Secundi
The phone rang in the kitchen, an eager chime. She leapt back, eyes wide. He felt the flesh of her palm press into his left clavicle. She left the room. He tried not to listen to the conversation she had. He watched the late afternoon unfold on the street outside the living room window. The sun cast tight shadows below the houses. Two young boys rode by on impossibly small bicycles. He wanted to pluck them up by the hair and toss them onto their parents’ grassy lawns. He wanted to watch their bicycles roll in lazy half-circles before clattering to the ground.
Contorni
She came back into the room red-faced, glassy-eyed. He stood up, tried to fit his arms in the space above her tiny hips. Her hands fluttered over his arms. She pinched him hard, pressing the elephant’s skin at his elbow between two pink fingers.
Dolci
Buds were just beginning to appear on the spindly trees along the highway. Tiny artichokes. She put the car in park before he had finished braking and swung out of the passenger door, all flyaway hair and swishing nylon backpack. He left the car running as he watched her walk the long block back to school.
Filed by frances at October 21st, 2007 under prose poems
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October 14, 2007
She begged, wheedled, and cajoled,
Inventing bribes out of glittering
July snowstorms and Bengal tigers
Loping sensuously down Park Avenue
Outside his office.
She delivered pears whose seeds
Unfurled as fragrant flowers
At the bottom of his styrofoam coffee cup,
Hoisted the sails of great ships as they
Glided darkly on the current of the air
Above Fifty-Ninth Street.
When he said no,
She retreated in a
Calcified emerald shell,
Fibonacci’s cold pleasure.
Filed by frances at October 14th, 2007 under poems
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Evening bloomed persimmon over industrial Brooklyn, hard gray shapes cordoned in rows under the concrete frown of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
On Carroll Street two old men, their faces a map of the Gowanus, pushed piles of like suits across a vinyl-covered table that had been host to bake sales and church potlucks in the time of Carter but now was anchored, a rusted sentinel, near the corner of Second Street.
Underground, rats chattered about the G train, bathing in warm rivulets running parallel to the humming tracks.
Filed by frances at October 14th, 2007 under prose poems
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October 12, 2007
Back then,
before the machines made us breakfast —
each perfect cornflake cut
like a cookie,
dull orange scab —
we gathered in gray
pre-dawn light
to pick our teams:
You, they said,
pale pointing fingers.
We moved swiftly over long, wet grass
to join our new families.
Scraps of cloth hung from
our jackets,
the elbows threadbare,
tenuous,
torn textile.
We called the red dog
and everyone took turns
breaking the chain.
Filed by frances at October 12th, 2007 under poems
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October 11, 2007
She sang in French,
Are you sleeping,
are you sleeping,
brother John?
Perfectly permed white curls crowned her pink beak.
I wondered if she would remember
how to work the key when Saint Peter
invited her over for tea
some afternoon soon.
She was her father’s daughter again,
wide-eyed with surprise at cousins, sons,
happy to meet, again and again, her fascinating,
mysterious progeny, my, how they had grown.
Marian, Marian, you told the detective
your maiden name when he found you there,
on the outskirts of the airport,
polyester pant suit,
and he remembered the family,
he remembered them.
Filed by frances at October 11th, 2007 under poems
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October 10, 2007
One evergreen tree,
a big top in a circus of maples.
A damp discarded cushion
sagged over a slender bough.
This is where we kept watch,
our soaring late summer post.
We saw the silver curve of the street,
pale aluminum trash cans,
the paper boys —
our friends in their summer job roles —
then fathers, smooth jawbones, kissed,
sent off to the city.
We stayed silent as
our mother crossed the lawn
and summer’s wet breath
rose up around us.
Filed by frances at October 10th, 2007 under poems
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