Going Home

There isn't as much gum
in New York
as people will lead you to believe.
It is not
smeared across every surface
or stuck under each 
railings.

The people in 
New York are not
as rude as you are told.

Everything flows,
liquid city
and it's smooth
like pulp-free 
orange juice.
A man gave me his
sunny seat on
the subway one day,
the car
completely crowded.

The people will tell you jokes
in the street,
and ask you directions.
A woman was told she won
a trip to Jamaica,
and she became so excited
(here the man laughs)
she asks, "when can I leave?"
(Oh here's the punch-line)
What do you mean, leave?
You're here!
It was a trip to Jamaica 
Queens.

There are bright umbrellas
hovering above black coats
in the rain,
fruit trucks unloading
morning produce,
everyone slithers across
the streets
like beautiful serpents.

I went to nearly
one million bodegas,
each with its own
accent.
Each had a counter full of
sweets
and a girl with a pretty face.

Everyone will tell you
New York is a commercial nightmare.
I ask them where they
went,
because it must not
be the same Manhattan I journeyed through.

With ancient stone churches
and limestone headstones,
strangers watching basketball
games in the park.
It isn't my home
they're talking about,
the streets pound in my veins.

So when they tell you
New York is.
I tell you,
New York 
isn't.

Sundae Clown

Folded-over lace socks
on little girls
with legs that dangle
over chair-edges
like a ragdoll's.
And the wide white room
is elegant to
small sparkly eyes,
while adults
attend to business lunches
on the rainy afternoon.
Their brown suits
stiff and crinkles
like their half-eaten
salads.
Water glasses sweat
under the pressure.

There are even tablecloths
and the waitstaff where aprons,
this is the fanciest place
for little girls
with bright frocks
in all of Lima, Ohio.
Top floor of the Lazarus
building at the mall.
A view
down onto the seagulls
in the parking lot,
pot-holed
and glistening
with split oil.

The clinking of cheap flatware
is magical
like song,
and somewhere
in her mind they are dancing,
these pitchers and
forks
like Beauty and the Beast.

And the smiling waitress
coos over the little girl
and brings out a 
sundae smiling like a clown.
It's a speciality.
Fit for a princess.

The suits with their briefcases
don't know they are
in the presence
of royalty.

Bayou

Modern bayou 

voodoo soul,

in the humid

wooded cabin on stilt

chicken-legs,

Baba Yaga 

inside

with her gnarled knuckles.

Cafe lights glitter

in the Spanish moss,

ancient winds 

still whisper through

the foggy swamps.

Owls chitter

after the little

crazy-haired girls

sleep,

the fan boats

float in green

majesty. 

The mangrove roots

twist deep

into the earth,

kissing into

millions of years.

Baba Yaga 

of the swamp

flicks her wrists

and her knuckles snap

and the earth sighs

deep in her bones.

The house creaks 

above the frog-filled

water,

and the cat sleeps on the porch.

The breeze

breathes thank you

stirring the curtain's hem.

March

Palpitations in the shower
and my hands shake
spreading butter
on the burnt toast.
Here are my legs
pooling into my shoes
across the dim 
linoleum.

Sometimes trains
get stuck
or even lost,
because somebody fell
asleep on the job
switching levers.
And the conductor of
my brain is one of them.

There are railcars full of
lost letters and unraveling
sweater ends
somewhere,
but directing trains backwards
wasn't anyone's forte.

So my hands
trace letters that
don't exist yet
and out the window
little green stalks
start to grow
into March.

Pine Island

There was a bank of low-hanging pines
on the corner
of Aster Drive.
Across the street from
Big Bear supermarket.
Here we sat
and were shielded from home,
where nobody could ever see
us,
millions of miles away.
I was not supposed to go there.

There was eternally mud
there in the dense pine needles
and we molded little
mud pots and left them out to dry,
make-beliveing we maybe had no homes
or maybe were Indians.

We scattered pine needles
on our crude pottery before 
being called for dinner,
so nobody could steal
our prizes.

Each day with the sun
half-down in the fall
a little girl told me stories
as we muddied our hands.

A piece of burlap appeared
one day,
looking red-stained in our
imaginations.
This was the clothing of a murdered
man, she told me.
He died right here,
we are sitting on his body.
I fingered the cloth
and felt my stomach 
churn.
She told me
never to tell.

Nobody could know we'd found
this body,
we had found a dead man
and his clothes.

Only years later
and miles away would
I know,
this was fabric wrapped around the base of the pine,
but my fingers still
know the truth.

[This is also nonfiction.]

Duplex

When I was a little girl,
living in a brick duplex
my mother had an electric foot-bath.
The kind that heats the water
with bath salts
and then makes a little
jacuzzi
just for your feet.

And after she was done
I would get to put my small feet
in and the bubbles
would froth across my ankles.
My little red toes would peek out,
their image distorted by 
waves
as The Brady Bunch
played on 
TV Land.

This was a long time ago,
when my mama and I would
stay up late,
so late
like maybe 10 pm sometimes
to wait for my father
to come home.

Without him my mother
felt uneasy
and wouldn't sleep
and so neither did I,
and we still sleep 
with tense limbs
when he is away.

We would sit on the plaid couch 
and armchair
while the Brady family
wandered lost in the mountains
on their vacation.
I remember no words from
these times.

And some nights
my dad would come after 
I fell asleep
or he would bring home
little stuffed animals
from the Holiday Inn,
where he was assistant manager.
A little stuffed whale
he pulled from behind his back,
and then I could sleep
in my Pooh bear nightgown
and red toenails
all clean from
the foot-bath.

[This is nonfiction poetry.]

Apartment Buildings

Headlights paint themselves

across the ceiling

like scattering deer.

Scattering my thoughts

in the floating between

sleep and wakefulness.

Broken beams sweep the

room like ghosts

all night,

all night

disembodied neighbors

coming home from

far away

or down the street,

or the back alleys of downtown.

Their footsteps coming up heavy in the hallway.

The elevator chimes 

into small hours,

and I lie awake

in sweat.

All of the secret lives

going on beyond papery walls

so close I could touch them

but don't.

Translucent souls

walking the worn carpet

whose names I'll never know,

but call neighbors.

Do they come in

with smokes, or brown-bagged bottles.

Girls or groceries?

I only lie in the twin bed

beneath the window

of the fifth floor.

Night music

until at last

all sleeps,

or at least, is quiet.

No more tracks of headlights over my head,

no more chimes or lumbering rhythms.

A cat yowls in the alley with the garbage cans

but my neighbors are home

and tucked in their own nooks

and niches,

and we sleep,

breathing collectively.

Untitled

In the old photograph
there's a boy
with a blackboard
writing upside down.

But it's not a trick
of turning the board upside or
some illusion,
because the brain turns all
our images right-side up,
but sometimes brains get
broken
in infancy
or in the place before that,
and so this boy's pictures
came out upside down.
His eyes were
in the pure state
without mirror-magic.

Everything was not the
way everyone wanted it to be,
but the small boy with glasses
didn't mind much,
for he saw as he did
and wrote and read
and went to school.

Burned

We sat outside in the dusk
flicking cigarette ashes 
into a coffee can,
rusted out by
weather.
The screen door
swung on its broken hinges
and squalled like
a newborn baby
red-faced and 
dying.

Filling our lungs up
with smoke 
so we could maybe float
for a little while,
hover above the
cracked cement
and stone.

I'd read in the newspaper
of a pilotless plane.
A red biplane 
that took off by itself.
Just like a mechanical bird
arching into the sky
above the verdant fields
of Ohio.

And I thought
aloud to you,
I wish I was a red biplane.
My lungs exhaled 
burning smoke,
pungent grey
and you laughed.

The plane flew until
its engine gave up,
the fuel tank gave only fumes.
It burnt out into
a red smudge
on a farm.
And I wondered where it
had wanted to go.

Watching the burnt out bodies
of our neighbors from
the porch,
each day,
and somedays
in the drought we watched
the irrigation rigs
cleanse and feed the soybeans
across the street.
A field
just so like the one
my red plane came to rest in.

You picked up your sweater
and walked away,
waving a limp hand.
See you tomorrow, 
as always
as always.

Rio

Looking down the dirty streets of Rio,
there is a line,
and below it
lie riches,
color. 
From my 
home, 
I look out the pane less
window,
down onto the 
bright houses of
blue and yellow,
stucco walls
and porticos.

Always electricity,
glowing homes down the hill
in the night.
Here,
only the sounds of
the drunken homeless,
the hopeless.
Somewhere
near, a television catches
static.

The electricity is turned
off after 10.
But I hear
the song of freedom
even after the 
television stations sign off
for the night.

The burlap of a curtain
breathes in the hole
in the wall that is
window.
The night breeze sighs
on my cheek.

Tomorrow the slum
will awaken
full of peddlers
and gossips,
children running barefoot
on the dirt paths.
Chicken will mill in 
muddy yards.

And soft,
across the breeze,
the sound of another life
blows upwind
to plant that seed in
our minds.

Down the road
there is another world from
this one.
Full of birds
and radios,
children with new shoes.

Midge

Hopefully This blooms into a whole poem, but I needed to put it somewhere before I forgot it.

So cold the roads pale,
winter, they year's child enticer,
wilting all it touches.