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3 poems
My Daddy's
Hands
They smell like grease guns,
oil changes, rebuilt carburators,
broken timing belts, leaky
radiators, and pumice hand cleaner.
They smell like a 6,000 mile road
trip, a turnpike travel stop,
two flat tires, a jack,
and an air wrench;
like a snow storm
across the continental divide,
like the dry heat of Arizona
desert, like salted air
from the Gulf of Mexico.
They smell like California grapes,
Florida oranges, Georgia peaches,
and New York apples, like
they just unloaded a trailer full
of almonds using only a pallet jack.
They smell like glass shards
expelled from the windshield
by two bullets during
the Teamster's strike,
like two weeks worth
of steering wheel foam
and gear shift plastic
and in a few days
they are coming home to rest.
But, when they're here
my Daddy's hands smell
like my bloody nose and tears.
My Daddy's hands smell exactly like
my fear and taste like a busted lip.
Poetry is the
only dignity I have left
I want my Daddy.
The one who reads stories
while I sit on his lap snuggled
against the safety of his chest,
the feel of hair beneath his shirt
against my cheek
while two meaty arms hold me;
not the one who molests
and beats me down.
Yet, when I read Robert Bly's
"Mourning Pablo Neruda,"
I am greived for my Daddy;
the man with bear paw hands,
who let me know a year before his death,
"I didn't beat you enough."
Asteroid
dedicated to mothers, sisters and daughters
From outer space came this mass of
rock? metal? glowing. The size of Japan.
and it moved slow relative to it's girth..
The shadow, how i held my breath
until impact! I don't think i felt it really.
I just remember the gash; water, seabed
tossed beyond my atmosphere and the heat.
Everything vaporized in an instant, somewhere
over the Pacific. And it spread, mushroomed
across the planet, first burning then melting
it all until the surface looked like a fireball.
But by that time, anything that flew out,
my gravity returned to me in a hail of embers.
Things stayed this way for at least a year,
going on five. Scientist say it will take a million
years before my planet will cool enough for clouds
to gather; that it will rain for a million more,
water tracing it's pattern across my Earth
before life will evolve new. How much past that
until we speak again?
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