Camptown Races

At the iron sink I divide
garbage: cobs for chickens
husks for compost

chore the fugitive
daughter of a grim ancestress
ditched in favor of

the Lowell mills (12 hours
a day 6 days a week 18 cents an hour)
better than her home prospects

once the solemnly composed Union
officer bared
his dusty head and delivered
bones swaddled like an unlovely infant

or diaries or nothing. Preferring rupture
to the role of family servant
rude to the consoling preacher

this willowy forget-me-not
spectre of a woman quit

milking slopping spinning
canning fragrant hot
berries shiny as forbidden
lipstick and removed

furtively, like a convict, a few eggs
in her apron, no shoes
or worn shoes pinching
each mile

to a hostel
with her own kind (and wrote
to Aunt Tillie Eustacia Dennett:
"I work for wages not bread")

stared at the piano roiling the parlor:
Camptown Races (racy, naughty)
Oh Promise Me
Billy Willy Kissme Again
sometimes Moonlight Sonata

though skin from her fingers
peeling with lye soap remains
between wide, valuable planks
I pace, casting entrails before

and applecores behind, in her
uncivil revolutionary shadow.

:: Joyce Peseroff, in The American Voice #29 (1992)

Enough

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.

I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
My rage is a kind of domestic rage.

I learned it from my mother
Who learned it from her mother before her

And so on.
Surely the Greeks had a word for this.

Now, surely the Germans do.
The more words a person knows

To describe her private sufferings,
The more distantly she can perceive them.

I repeat the names of all the cities I've known
And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.

What does it mean to love the life we've been given?
To act well the part that's been cast for us?

Wind.   Light.   Fire.   Time. 
The train whistles through the far hills.

One day I plan to be riding it.

:: Suzanne Buffam, in Crazyhorse #75 (Spring 2009)

Tip

I acknowledge the dishwasher his further mopping.
The knives I've dropped.
The restaurant we work in once
was a bank and before that it was a restaurant

and before that it was a bank. We store sugars in the vault and gold
butter foil is sticking to the floor. The tallest man at the bar
leans into me. I hope you closer have into me a good closer, even closer

night. Across the street they're mopping and two doors down
there's mopping too. From the alley is a topographic rhythm

of horn players in succession. I run my hands over every table
with a rag. Maybe someday this will be a bank again

when the waitresses are ghosts and deeds
have been turned over. I imagine my money as a sign of good exchange.

It's late, you've been deserted,
I say to the man dissolving sugar into coffee.
I'm from a big family, he assures me,

I like to be alone. Sometimes I can see in a stranger's eyes
all there is to know. This love of loneliness. Ask me

what state I was born in.
I am waiting on you, my cause célèbre, can I bring you a spoon?

:: Gabriella Klein, in Field #73 (Fall 2005)

The Blue Cup

Through binoculars the spiral nebula was
a smudged white thumbprint on the night sky.
Stories said it was a mark left by the hand
of Night, that old she, easily weaving
the universe out of milky strings of chaos.

Beatrice found creation more difficult.
Tonight what she had was greasy water
whirling in the bottom of her sink, revolution,
and one clean cup.

                               She set the blue cup
down on the table, spooned instant coffee, poured
boiling water, a thread of sweetened milk. Before
she went back to work, she drank the galaxy that spun
small and cautious between her chapped cupped hands.

:: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999)

Mending a Net

Outside, an old man who might have been
   a prophet mended a net and whistled
      something tuneless and familiar.

Across the road in the paint-flecked house,
   old women sipped coffee and spoke
      about heathens and church attendance.

The old man knew the voices--Mary Lambert, Eunice Haddock,
   Abigail Crane, the door-to-door breakfast committee
      at Good Shepherd Baptist. They spoke of an Easter Festival,

a Spring Fair to bring lost souls home.
   Words sliced through the screen porch.
      Gulls floated on wind blown

in from the bay, white hard-edged
   divots cut in a calcium sky.
      Down the oyster-shell road, by palm scrubs

and slash pine saplings, ditches stood stagnant, mosquitoes hovered,
   thick as thumbs. Rain had been falling
      for weeks; the old man's knees became his almanac.

His knuckles throbbed with a red, pulsing ache.
   The old women talked in blue, quilted voices,
      words like the interweaving of a cast net

or maybe like the weights that pull it down,
   the cinch that pulls mullet and trout in close
      before the fisherman draws sieve from water.

Someone may have mentioned his name, gestured with a chipped cup lip,
   but syllables knotted together
      and the old man lost the sounds as the south winds blew.

The net now finished, pooled at his feet.
   Behind him, a wooden box of nets to be mended.
      Above, gulls and gray could mean something

if he looked, if he took the moment to decipher
   what might not be a message. But the wind cut
      grooves in his skin. His fingers had gone numb.

:: Jeff Newberry, in Gulf Stream #25, 2006

So What

My father, after repairing triple-load washers for twelve hours

on a Saturday, would put on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and call

me into the garage. "Hear this, slugger? One four five. That's

all there is. Sons o' bitches. . ." I never understood how any

man could be on his back for twelve hours and come home to

listen to Miles Davis for another three. We split Budweisers.

"So What" always on. I remember it that way. He sang the 

words that Miles didn't need. I was ten, eleven. The sun still

out. Coltrane fading in after Miles' solo, then Miles gone.

Gone for most of the song. He's not allowed to come back

until the end. Those are the rules. That's the thing: my father

taught me this. The rhythm section the whole time keeping

time like running water. Brush stroke, snare off, over and 

again. Coltrane catches the wind of the last phrase, echoes,

and goes off wherever it was he went off to: Paradise, fishing with

a cooler full, the driveway spotted with oil, the gear grease on

his glasses and collar, the grease in his hair glinting blue at his

wake, "So What" instead of a sermon.

:: Alexander Long, Light Here, Light There (2009)

The Riveter

George was serenading me as he showered
and had I not ducked in for a wet grab, a warm view
of white suds where his leg hair was curly and thick,
I would not have been the first to see three clear words
materializing on the steamed-up mirror:
DAVE LOVES and then my name. I cooed
as one hand handled George, and one wiped glass.
Last week at the plant I left my desk and pens
to work down the line from him; a substitute
body was needed to rivet VINs into the hoods.
A woman with a strange machine in her hands,
I riveted in those long steel strips of numbers,
by which any man can prove a stolen car is his.

:: Katie Hartsock, in Clementine