about their drinking days
and trade around trucks
and stories about bad kids
and worsening eyesight.
When they think I’m eighteen,
they grin at the possibilities.
When they find out I’m thirtysomething,
the grins get a little sad
and soft around the edges,
at the thought
of the waste
of a good pair
of breeding hips.
I’d Melt
I want the kind of man
who wants the kind of woman
who keeps bacon grease.
He needs to notice
how it’s so much more
than stingy sustenance.
It’s ritual and relish,
the satisfaction of golden-brown biscuits.
He has to see
how it’s more
than just grease.
It’s gumption
and tradition
strained into a coffee cup
passed down through generations.
I need a man to recognize
the kind of love worth saving.
I long for a love
that holds up
like cast iron.
Stacking Firewood
Sticks of seasoned oak
smack the bottom of my wagon
as I whittle away at the woodpile.
Bend and heave, grunt and let fly.
I suck down the coming snow
and fill my lungs so deep it stings.
I find my rhythm,
sweating steam in the cold sunshine.
Bend and heave, grunt and let fly.
I lose it again when I spot a patch
of purple moss worthy of a poem
and take it as a sign,
reward for hard work
turned to smoke.
Oatmeal Cookie Communion
The layered skirttail
brushing my plump, pink,
baby cheek
is plaid.
Skinny strips of harvest orange
and goldenrod yellow
pen in blocks of pea green.
The geometric fields and fences
are flip-flopped.
Planted beneath a swirl of paisley sea.
A housedress,
with every imaginable
blue hue
worn thin with age,
soft and semi-see-through.
The loose skin of the leg
shielded by the layers of cloth
is the same.
Translucent and shimmering
like a clean, cotton sheet
in the spring sunlight
on the clothesline strung
between maple trees out back.
There’s a thick, curvy, muscled calf
built up by farming
family bottomland,
tenderized by age and hard work,
and finally gone to seed.
Somewhere above the skirt
and the housecoat
and the apron
and the swirl of color and texture—
somewhere far above the vines
of defined veins easy to trace
with a four-year-old fingertip—
there was a woman.
A tender woman
and a tender, twangy voice
drifting down to me.
Somewhere up there
there were watery blue eyes
and thick plastic glasses
with even thicker lenses.
And a loose white bun
hovered above those
with strands as thin and delicate
as spider silk, escaping
to brush across her wrinkled face.
I stand to receive the homemade
oatmeal cookie communion
she
