Gay Marriage

This election year, I wonder
if my mother voted
to ban gay marriage.
I imagine her standing
in the make-shift booth
thinking of her wedding:
how her mother wasn’t alive
to see it; how after my father left,
the photos of her father in a suit
holding her white-laced hand
still hung in the bedroom.

I imagine she thought of infidelity:
how she told someone’s mother
that she and her husband
weren’t having sex anymore;
how towards the end, one Sunday
morning at mock family breakfast
(that she was still cooking)
her only daughter asked
her soon-to-be ex-husband,
“When are you going to get out
so my mother can stop sleeping
on the couch?” How she felt responsible.
(Mama, you are not responsible.)

Would she go to Papa’s same-sex wedding?
He would invite her: the mother of his children,
the woman who put herself second
(giving him the new car and taking the old-
It’s for his work.), the woman who
mopped marble floors, worked
and fed two kids while he
figured out just how much he liked men.

I imagine her imagining
the ceremony: gaudy, with showy
silver-cuffed suits and more made-up
men than women; how she would
go for the sake of her children,
for the sake of conversation;
how she would joke in Sicilian
with his brothers and sisters (those who would go)
that she never thought she’d see
her ex-husband marrying a man;
how it would be hard to tell what she really felt.

I imagine her marking “NO”
because that way she can let the state decide,
washing her hands of a marriage
that, aside from the children she loves,
should have never been.

Rot

Part of me likes to see fruit rot-
to keep it until it’s brown like dirt, clumped
like mud. It is the same part of me
that ends a relationship long after it’s over.
It’s easier to trash the thing I wanted-
green in the store, forgotten in the fridge-
when it’s patterned with worm holes,
oozing sour juice, no longer the ripe,
sweet apple I imagined.

Edit: This poem is featured in the September 2009 issue of Eudaimonia Poetry Review. To view, follow this link:http://www.epoetryreview.com/aprot.html

Morganne and I at the Saturday Morning Farmer’s Market

As we walk the aisles of onions,
broccoli, strawberries, and cherries,
I like to think we’re lovers picking
the reddest, most plump
tomatoes at the market for
Saturday night aphrodisiac dinner
(oysters and a bisque).
In front of the vendors I treat
her like my lover: I hold her bags
as she searches for buried money
under bushels of fresh spinach,
then help her pick the best batch
of raspberries-last week’s were moldy.
At home, we have male lovers.

One drunken night she looked at me
like a frightened five-year-old,
stringy blonde bangs a little wet from
sweating out the liquor; a hallucination
in her ear whispered it wanted her dead.
She said to me: You’re the only one that’s real
as her boyfriend frowned like a father
(half worry, half disregard) and put her to bed.

There was a day in Blanchard Park
when we were at the center of the sun,
a perfect egg of light circled by humming
cicada trees; we could of fallen
in love, but we were in love with men
who couldn’t love us back.

On Saturday morning we shop together,
an arranged marriage; she pays
cash for the food and I charge the coffee
as spring rain speckles our scalps and clothes;
it comes down harder as we sling full burlap bags
across our shoulders. On the way to the car, I
eye passers-by through wet lashes, saying:
don’t try; she’s mine.