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Five PoemsbyMarilyn L. Taylor
What They Don’t Know
They are thirteen, all flying elbows and thinbone knees, wrapping their tongues around words like pimp and bare-ass and hard-on. They are astounded by girls, the bodies of girls, the onrush of skin and hair, and they talk about what it would be to touch one of those flashy breasts, to look it in the eye. They are thirteen, and they don’t know about the Buick they might be riding in a year or two from now, packed in hip-to-hip chanting a frenzied go go go go until the pavement starts to bulge and crest, lifting them, sending them up into some kind of heartstop heaven. They don’t know that the tree might be an elm that the car will wrap itself around in lascivious embrace, or that afterwards a
thin, watery sigh Open
the door could be the first sound and the last before sirens take up the threnody. For now, though, they lean lightly on their slender bikes, polishing a
new language: horny, piss-off, kiss my
ass. Expertly they palm their cigarettes, the thick smoke streaming from their mouths and noses.
The
Lovers at Eighty Fluted light from the window finds her sleepless
in the double bed, her eyes measuring
the chevron angle his knees make under
the coverlet. She is trying to
recall the
last time they made love. It must
have been in
shadows like these, the morning his hands took
their final tour along her shoulders and down over
the pearls of her vertebrae to
the cool dunes of her hips, his fingers executing
solemn little figures of
farewell. Strange-- it’s not so much the
long engagement as the disengagement of
their bodies that fills the hollow curve
of memory behind her eyes-- how
the moist, lovestrung delicacy with
which they let each other go had
made a sound like taffeta while decades flowed across them like a veil.
To My Neighbor John, Who Is Completely Happy That
midnight warble in the summer dark is
you, John, singing your way home from
the Rehab Center where you work evenings--
one out of kilter chromosome has
never slowed you down. Your nightly whoop floods
the neighborhood with so much bliss that
my Dalmatian springs from sleep and
opens up her throat to harmonize with
you-- along with every other canine in
a one-mile radius. Soon the air is
vibrating for blocks with strains of
an unearthly sweetness-- prayers rising
from the bottom of the brain, an
ode to joy, with tabernacle choir.
The Vow I
mustn’t ever have another drink. I’m
stronger than I’ve ever been before, and
this time it’s going to work, I think. Still,
I know you’d raise a holy stink if
I should come careening through that door saying
I’ll never have another drink. You’d
tell me to go and see a shrink or
call the goddamn marriage counselor. But
this time it’s going to work. I
think the
kids would be surprised-- they’d blink like
I was going to fall down on the floor, but
I would not have had a single drink and
they’d see how far I’ve come from the brink of
disaster. So don’t worry anymore. Not
this time. It’s going to work,
and I think you
should consider letting me link up
with you again-- because I swore last
night I’d never have another drink, and
this time it’s going to work. I
think.
The Showdown Okay, Zucchini, with your sleek Sicilian good looks— I know all about you and the rest of the Zucca family, how you start out small, in the corner of some respectable old giardino (nobody even notices) and then you spread, don’t you, till you’ve moved in on all the little guys, the beans and the carrots and cukes, and pretty soon you’re in charge of the whole damn fattoria, right? Well, I’ve got news for you, pal, you’re past your prime. You’re ripe to spend the rest of your natural life in the cooler. Think I’m kidding? Listen, either play along or it’s
Ratatouille!
Ratatouille! —a year in the jug for you, Zuke. And your little tomato, too.
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