What Women Do
We women
maturate, matriculate, micturate, menstruate, masticate, marinate, mitigate, modulate, moderate, meliorate, machinate, motivate, manipulate, mismate,
medicate and mandate, and if we can’t mandate,
we masturbate.
We women
maturate, matriculate, micturate, menstruate, masticate, marinate, mitigate, modulate, moderate, meliorate, machinate, motivate, manipulate, mismate,
medicate and mandate, and if we can’t mandate,
we masturbate.
Over time I have lost
more than a few earrings.
I have a jewelry box
of mate-less pretties.
I recall a particular favorite,
tangerine in color, lost at church.
Another one, black and gold, fell
during a brisk autumn walk.
I still look for it along the route.
I got the idea to partner the singletons
in artistic, whimsical ways,
my ears a novel Match.com
But I would have been better off
going pirate with only one.
A person reaches the age
when wearing mismatched earrings
hints at something
not clever and imaginative
but puzzling and peculiar.
It has been brought to my attention
that I have reached that age.
Ode to William R. Wells
PFC 331 INF 83 DIV
Kentucky, July 4th, 1944
This is the moon we sink our hands into,
craters spiral under tentative footsteps
weightlessly moving from the sea,
silent as dark stars, burning in our guts,
Beneath an American flag the coastline
bides quiet as a promise. Terrifyingly still,
having been mourning for nearly eighty years,
swallowing sorrow and foreigner’s flowers.
We are trespassers to a great tragedy,
looming around the edges of a memory
we do not own. Passed down through bone,
the saltwater in our blood thins to a whisper.
We’ll picture their bodies, surrendered to only tide
and god. Did he watch, did he kneel on the backs
of every dove that will not sing? Much larger
than all tragedies, we’ll picture their lives.
The million shattered relics dissolving
through the turning of hands, through
mothers missing sons, through poppies
on the outskirts of Omaha, bleeding wind.
The clouds come with condolence, the skyline
folds over her every wound where angels
came through. Angels, in the hills, on the bluffs
watching the wheel turn, watching the end come.
The wildflowers do not deal in war, only dream
of centuries they’ve never touched. White butterflies
obliviously kiss every bomb crater, wandering ghosts.
Come light on our palms, let us remember.
The Red Light
stops me
a cacophony of chirps
penetrate through closed windows
through the smooth-running engine’s hums
through the starless darkness
confused by this unusual occurrence
of earlier than the early birds’ avian chatter
I open the cockpit’s porthole to get a better listen
I am transported to the airport’s
drop-off and pick-up area
where incessant avifauna noise
plays on a loop meant to keep all
real birds at bay
I say to myself there is no way
anyone would do such a thing
play fake birdsong out here on the edge
of town next to the interstate
adjacent from affordable housing
a traffic light that’s never red at 430AM
was crimson this morning so I might be privy
to something new this day
with eyes and ears open to a life
outside of and bigger than my little world
a transcending sanity washes me awake
self exile after war’s end
There is nowhere
that you do not see. How pretty
the days of you.
