My Mom Never Kept Soda in the House

Every other Friday, at exactly 5:30,

You’d come get me.

My business-suit savior

Slowly ascending up my driveway

In your practical tan Camry.

Your knock

Knock

On the front door,

My tiny multicolored neon rolling suitcase,

You’d scoop it up in your arms and place it

Gently in the trunk

I’d wave bye to mom,

A frozen figurine with a drawn-on smile.

Back to your house on Lakeside Place

There is no lake, but a horse shoe of brick look-alikes

Wishing they were more

Luxurious, more

Prestigious, more

Important

Our night was chocolate ice cream in ceramic bowls,

Topped with tiny colored candy-coated chocolate balls.

Our night was me trying to elude the bathtub.

Our night was Star Trek and Uno,

I watched Star Trek because you liked it,

I liked anything you liked.

Our night was my memorized prayer,

My script to God.

I prayed for mom and you and your girlfriend and her wiener dog.

And my lullaby was the sirens and engines and chilling shouts

Of a neighborhood that pretended to be classy.

Saturday I opened your bright white fridge,

Glowing with emptiness of a man who travels.

Lined up in a row on the side of the fridge

Were three red cans of Dr. Pepper,

Our favorite.

I took one out and popped the cold silver tab.

That noise,

That fresh, crisp pop and fizzle

Sounded like cold itself.

You were making cheese quesadillas and chicken and stars soup.

We sat down at the kitchen table and ate our lunch,

The same lunch we had every other Saturday.

I had another Dr. Pepper

Because you asked if I wanted one.

Eleven birthdays

and many every other Fridays later,

Neither of us drink Dr. Pepper.

The other day I took a sip of my friend’s Dr. Pepper,

And it was like you

And cheese quesadillas

Had punched me in the face.

Happiness

Her turquoise toes stroke
The heated sand,
A strand of hair is wind whipped.
She scans the water, lets it lick
Her turquoise toes.
Her knees freckled
On daisy skin, not tanned.
She ran
Into the waves that softly spray.
No man but her belongs there,
Inhaling sun and salt and what

 Is grand.

I really like this poem by Gwendolyn Books. It’s called “We Real Cool”.

                                                 The Pool Players.

                                            Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurke late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing in. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

I already tingle

before I sip it.

The rich aroma can stand strong

on its own,

or with a splash of milk or

with a sprinkle of sugar.

I gingerly sip

that first hot wave and immediately

my body calms,

my brain begins and

I feel fixed again.

The Summer Day
 
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

I’ve decided to start just blogging poems/my poems/anyones poems that I come across, in light of my busy-ness and that Im taking poetry writing this semester. Here is one I wrote today about wontons. I’ll explain: Our professor had us bring in a line of poetry we admire and I picked a line from Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman. The line is:

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

So then she told us to change the nouns and adjectives in the line of poetry to another noun or adjective with the same first letter. Enter wontons… here is my poem.

I’m a wonton

Perfectly.

Perfect wonton,

That’s me.

Me in your soup

Creating that crispy crunch

Watch me float and dance

While you stir the hot, hot soup.

Sip or Spoon, dripping, dripping,

You know I make it better.

I’m a wonton

Perfectly.

Perfect wonton,

That’s me.