Mama and I uncover her old photos.
I like how they have a frame:
a thin white border
smaller than a Polaroid’s.

“May I have this one?”
She wants to know why.

Because I can tell
you’re in a hotel room,
squash yellow walls
barely lit behind you.
You’re in a hot pink
halter nightie—A-line,
white stripe empire waist.
Sideways on a rumpled bed,
one arm drapes a pear hip,
the other props you up.
I can tell you tried to stick
your knees together with sweat,
but a white triangle is peeking.
They must have been cotton.
I love your pencil-thin brows,
and your eyes lined black
staring at whoever takes the photo—
the bell hop, a 70s prog rock
drummer, a bad boy biker,
a friendless female hitchhiker
you met at the bar downstairs?

Here you smile without wrinkles.

“You were about my age.”

It’s that long and winding something, oh darling, where we sing and dance in car seats as mechanics change oil around us; remember, that one Sunday, the two of us, a day in the life of God and the barefoot corpse. The year we didn’t speak, I imagined we were Paul and John; that we separated because of squabbles over lovers, Linda’s father, our changing attitudes arguing about happy-go-lucky tunes and pseudo politico lyrics; as if there was no yelling in the hall about adulthood, what it meant to wash my walls where friends had spilled wine and chocolate.

Imagine the band got back together.

We had a reunion show, got stoned afterward. In your studio, Eleanor Rigby and Lovely Rita sniffed out my boy cats on my clothes, and remembered me immediately, meowing and shaking their whiskers. We never missed a note, harmonized like harp strings. We laughed at everything: the Ballyshannon Drive prank war involving a can of tuna and a car seat, Martha’s mutant eye, my drunken belligerence outside Eye Spy on Bungalow Bill’s birthday. You saw my blond, freckled Yoko really loves me; I saw you are not stuck in the early 60s. Now I’ll never be shot outside the Dakota, and you won’t be left alive, just Ringo for company. That’s if we were Beatles.

and I’m the only woman. This is a school. I am 1/3 of a teaching team; me and two men: an educational threesome. So scandalous, even thinking it. The student body is 98% male. Tech college: all programmers. So I’m seeing an ex-student. Sure he’s younger, blond, freckled—but not a baby. Grown. Two adults. (Con)sensual. Male (age: 22). Female (age:25). When I say it that way, it doesn’t sound so obscene. Some (school-boy fantasy) porno. Such a naughty teacher. Although the first kiss didn’t come until well after he received final grades. I didn’t want to be that (woman they beat off to) teacher. Although it’s impossible not to become her: as soon as I walk away, their eyes follow my flesh’s every movement. My lover (someone on the inside) told me. Not (all) the staff, but the students; the men—some staff, some ex-students—thought my unmarried co-worker was nailing me. Fuck it: I’ll be a slut (in day dreams, in urinal talk, in Penthouse letters) no matter what, whether I wear turtle necks and tunics, burlap sacks, a bonnet, never have a boyfriend, never make eye contact with men. Let them wonder (stares won’t slump my shoulders): am I wearing panties underneath this cotton dress?

At 4, I asked Mama as she washed me if
I could have the ruby ring flowering
diamond petals when she died.
Hushed, she scrubbed and said yes.

Could I have the ruby ring flowering
a blood drop, waved in sweet water?
Hushed, she scrubbed and said yes.
The thought of her ring,

a blood drop waved in sweet water:
the moment I became human.
The thought of her ring
is an anchor to

the moment I became human.
Remembering Mama’s mortality
is an anchor to
personal responsibility.

Remembering her mortality
as she scrubbed my breastless chest—her
personal responsibility—
she was surprised by her baby.

As she scrubbed my breastless chest, her
hands became her mother’s;
Mama’s surprised by her baby
when she tells the story.

Her hands became her mother’s:
the palm lines that tell our future.
When Mama tells the story
the patterns of my fingerprints are

the palm lines that tell our future.
If my hands become unfamiliar,
the patterns of my fingerprints are
lost, and the ruby is just a rock.

He touched me so much
I don’t know my own fingers.
For a few days, I like that he’s gone.
I haven’t soaked since he left.
Deep and oval, my tub is built for two.
When I sit between his legs,
my back against his chest,
we are a perfect fit.

A crinkled, floating hair
sneaks underneath my fingernail
and I’m reminded of his grazing fingers,
idling in thatches, lazing in the brush.
If I cut the grass my oasis will run dry
and the animals will go extinct.

I split at my fault line and burrow
to the center of the earth,
imagining he’s here:
wet dreadlocks like slugs
slide across my shoulders
as he turns his head to kiss
the other side of my neck;
no bites, no blood: thick kisses
made slick with orchid oil.
My slow sigh exhales his image,
fogging over the mirror.
I’ve drenched the empty
bathroom in his memory.
By the time he comes back,
it will have evaporated.

Life’s been beachy since babyhood; grew up in Hollywood, Florida, the ‘hood of sandy mangrove hands where bridalhood doesn’t beach well: the tan of frying pans beaches full belly bodies scathed on the kitchen-beach reef. A bridegroom spells doom at the beachfront ball: tall, tuxed, full of nuts—mansome, handsome, but bad at beach ball. Can’t play the game chain linked, gold-ring synced. A ball and chain is not a jolly volley; a name’s sent over the net. Mrs. ain’t a simple title, or a pimple, pock mark, son spot hot for a little man’s ‘hood. Who has an address at Sand Castle Strip? Single Sally selling seashells by the seashore, that’s who.

He said he loved me;
I laughed hysterically,
as if we lay in
a field of poppies instead
of indoors on floral sheets.

My twat is hot. My
pussy is cushy. My cunt
pulls stunts. My box plots.
My vertical smile spans
miles. My slit knows her shit.

–Noun

1. A prison bearing two X chromosomes in the hell nuclei and morally having a vagina, a uterus, and ovaries, and developing at puberty a relatively hounded body and enlarged beasts, and retaining a headless face; a gill or a woman.

2. An orgasm of the hex or sexual phrase that morally produces egg spells.

3. Botany. A pissed at plant.

–Adjective

4. of, penetrating through, or bullying a female animal or plant.

5. of, restraining to, or characteristic of a female prison; feminine: female suffering; female harmed.

6. Compost of females: a female citizenship.

7. Botany.

a. Indoctrinating or alienating to a plant or its reproductive sculpture that produces or contains elements requiring familiarization.

b. (of weed plants) pissed on.

8. Machinery. Being or craving a recessed heart into which a corresponding heart fits: a female plug. Impair MALE, (def. 5).

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