December - Poem 13
The Lifeguard Talks to Me About Meat / Kate Bowers
Terri the lifeguard is 57. Her husband Tom is 71. Part of their love language is a full course dinner, home cooked, each night.
Teri is telling me this as I float at her feet in the warm pool. Technically, she is on the pool deck, dry as a bone, while I marinate in chlorine.
The price of meat is high, and Terri is trying to lose 20 lbs and is mad as hell that her husband can eat anything and not gain an ounce. She makes him an antipasto small plate every night to graze on while she is still cooking. “A small plate” she calls it.
Tom does not cook. But he requires a meat, potatoes, gravy, salad, applesauce, a veg, and a dessert for him to consider dinner to be a real dinner. Every night.
There is pizza, too, and pasta on occasion, according to Terri. But none of these are going to take you down two dress sizes within a month’s time for a beloved nephew’s wedding.
Terri, as you have surmised, is now eating very tiny meals in comparison to her husband.
“You know who has gorgeous meat?” she says. “This new place up the street—Henry’s Meat Market.”
“Really? I haven’t tried it.”
“Well, I’m telling you. Their meat is GORGEOUS!”
Then she rotates off her shift and heads over to the steam room to make sure no one has passed out in there. Again. So I climb out and make my way past all the NO JUMPING signs that all the kids and most of the guards ignore. I walk over to the whirlpool (also NO RUNNING, but I think you know that already) and step right into a conversation about meatloaf.
“I really can’t stay more than a minute or two,” says an older woman with the kind of hair requiring a weekly salon set. Luckily, she is seated right next to the steps braced for her forthcoming anxious and I guess rapid exit.
“I made a meatloaf for dinner tonight, but my husband ate half of it for lunch. I told him it was for dinner, but he just kept eating. Now I don’t know what I’m going to do for dinner. I don’t even know if I have any meat left in the house.” She is talking to no one and everyone but mostly to herself. I feel like she might be suffering from PTSD.
The men in the hot tub are uninterested. Instead, they are still talking about how the unions have ruined the automobile industry. I guess they already know the true price of steak.
Feeling a little too parboiled at this point, I trade the whirlpool for the locker room where I hear on the other side of a row of lockers two of the high school swim team girls talking as they fluff and comb.
“You know who has good meat? ALDI’s.”
“What about their chicken?”
“So fresh! But their meat! CHEF’S KISS!”
As I finish dressing, I run my tongue across my teeth just to make sure. After all, when I had scanned in today, Tony behind the counter had called out “Well, hello gorgeous!” And was that a chef’s kiss gesture he had made as well with his right hand? Or was the stylus just tangled? Again?
Security Blanket / Katie Collins
The night
Laundry in the washer
Halfway through the cycle
Sleep eludes you
Because your comforter is in that load
If only the night lasted longer
Or the wash shorter
By the time it's washed, and then dried,
You'll have shivered away half the night.
Blankets are no substitute no matter how many you try.
You won't take another bed
You'd rather only sleep half the night
Than break in a stranger
Lost in the Shuffle / Ellen Ferguson
Pawned: flute, good camera, pearls
Given foolishly: fifty Snoopy paperbacks
Spent: savings
Lost: hope
Pawned: hope
Given foolishly: savings
Spent: fifty Snoopy paperbacks
Lost: flute, good camera, pearls
You asked where the money went, whence
sprang the lime tree, wherefore bloomed the bower
What is sacrifice? A lamb on a branch trying
To disappear at the arboretum
Origin Story as Arbitrary Narrative / Chris Fong Chew
In the space of the narrative
there exists a beginning
and an ending.
Arbitrarily chosen
in between the space of the
previous and ending period.
Words written onto the page
begin arbitrarily, entering
a conversation with other
writers, speakers, thinkers
because the words on the page
are spelled, arbitrarily.
The space of the narrative
is written in the space of the page.
The space of the page is contained in
the volume of the book.
The volume of the book is contained
in the shelf of the collection.
The shelf of the collection lost in the
dust of the archive.
Between arbitrary beginnings and endings
Are discoveries and (re)discoveries,
dust being blown off the covers of the
arbitrary beginnings and endings
and clearing the space between the
previous period and the ending period
of arbitrary time.
Nostalgia is blood-poison in the letting / Davis Hicks
Not for the unhinging, or to drag reaction from the unbluffed.
Daydream drips, that saline only a breadcrumb,
only any rise-reminder
of the leaving-behind. Felt as children feel, with searching, unwavering fingers.
Trained out as empathy is, scrapped out from under the fingernail,
coated over with so many base-coat callouses,
unscabbable. Convinced as cows are into curve-callings that
honesty has no heroics,
that the past is meant to lava lamp in its curling cascade.
Blush and stammer won’t help,
though the feeling of that echo-etching exhale might.
Those signs
of shock or hesitance in the blink-blinding, floating as the flocks do,
are all power proof of blood and something breakable.
Only the sticking plaster,
that wrap of guarding-gauze
offers what you are willing
to call
the truth.
My grandfather’s shotgun / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
As first target, the tin can was the hardest.
It shifts without warning or reason -- now
to the right of the front sight, then to the left.
Father said his father was a great
shot. Never missed a sparrow in flight.
The key was focus. Lock the forearm
between the thumb and the pointing
finger. It directs the pellet, not the barrel.
Hold the breath, an exhale throws a curve.
Birds are easy targets. Once they became
still as a canister, they were swift to fall.
Light as a feather, heaviest win to recall.
(My Road) / Jen Wagner
I found myself sitting at the edge of my bed.
Trying to write a poem.
For a project you know nothing about.
But as in most moments of stillness,
I find myself thinking of you.
Rumination still weighs heavy.
In these moments, I let myself collapse into the memories.
(All these years later.)
Today I found myself on the back roads that I once travelled so many times.
To make my way to you.
I wanted to close my eyes to see how well I still remembered.
The curves as familiar as the bend of my wrist as it drapes over the steering wheel.
The way I remember the exact place where my belly would start to feel the excitement.
What I once thought of as anticipation.
(My favorite)
Now I realize, it was always just the dips in the road.
(My road)
Because I feel them now.
And it still makes me happy.
Even if we passed one another
You wouldn’t know me.
Perhaps to see me.
(Perhaps.)
But very little is the same.
The music is at full volume.
(As usual)
But, songs I never sent you.
Little loves I’ll never share.
My coat is the same.
But the heart it conceals is harder now.
More protected from calloused hands.
I have business here today.
Nothing to do with you.
And that makes me smile.
I find joy only in this road.
(My road).
Favor / Stacy Walker
Always balancing
What is given
And received,
Tallying
The back and forth.
An inability
To be gifted,
Indebted,
To another,
An immediate impulse
To even the score.
A constant calculating
Of the investment
And return
Of time,
Money,
Love,
In my direction,
Ensuring
I never
Let the scales tip
My way,
The weight of gravity
Pulling me down,
Taking me under,
Burying me alive,
Drowned by the imposition
Of me,
The bother
I’ve become,
My greed now clear,
As I subtract more
Than I add,
My presence no longer
Justified
If I fall behind,
No longer atoning
For the favor
I’ve been given –
My existence.
