Category: Poems & Photographs

The Ice-Cream Man in the little truck playing
“Bicycle Built for Two”
speeds up as I run out of my house
wallet in hand with ice-cream on my mind.
No, really … with chocolate on my mind.
not the good kind of chocolate
connoisseurs like with caramel and salt
but the kind from childhood, the ice-cream bar
with thin slabs of chocolate
around a stick of vanilla ice-cream
so cold in the heat that taste doesn’t matter,
lying with my sister on the grass before her illness
trying to eat the bars before they dripped
sticky onto our necks and chests,
nibbling the top, then the sides, and finally,
licking the last bit off the wooden stick
savoring even that woody taste.

But now the Ice-Cream man speeds down the street
at the end of his day.
He no longer hears “Bicycle Built for Two,”
or sees the line of children chasing him
or me waving my wallet
and shouting at the top of my lungs
to the receding truck,
I remember!                I remember!

FEWalls

In this sweet curve of time we fly south,
over the up-lifted earth of the Sierra Nevadas,
gray-green forests brown where fire touched the stretching earth,
catchments of smooth blue water,
patches of snow cast like manna on the peaks.

In the plane, I see the small curl of a baby’s ear,
the slight redness in the fold of fat at the neck
as a young mother pats and rubs the back
of the crying child across her knee.
Clouds form from the gauzy light.

Later, holding the stranger’s baby asleep,
I remember the tough brown crust of bread
hot from the mud brick oven in the Kalahari Desert,
my own son cradled in my arms,
far, far away.

FEWalls

 

Amanda runs through the shallow waves

in her pink sun-suit and rubber boots,

yelps as she holds a crab,

its single pincher snapping.

 

Amanda grins and flashes the new front teeth

too big for the others; she sets the crab

down carefully among sea grasses,

the bud of its new pincher still safe to grow.

 

Amanda ignores the call from the shore

and the women from Vietnam bent-over

the tide flats placing crabs and clams

in plastic bags to sell.

 

Amanda smells like kelp in the sun.

Her hair damp, she licks salt from her lips,

squats in the shallows fingering the algae

and the roots of their hold-fast grabbing rocks.

 

The long blades of algae, brown, green, red,

bob on the waves with a strand of white

bleached out by age, sun, death.

 

Amanda stirs the sea lettuce.

She prods the starfish humped over a moonsnail,

its arms move slowly,

never tiring, never giving up.

 

Amanda stares at the abdomens of crabs

looking for the broadness of the female

hiding the ovaries. She misses

the red nipple of sea cucumber

wedged deep in the breakwater.

 

Amanda ignores her mother’s yell

from the shore, hands on hips,

“Lunch, Amanda, time to go,

right now, Amanda, time to go,

right now!”

 

FEWalls