StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XIII

Ice on the steps,
   Inches in the street,
Bodies slipsliding
   Every which way

What the sun might melt
   By mid afternoon
Freezes slick hard
   By midnight

The spring thaw,
   When it comes,
      If it comes,
Will take a month
   To rid us
Of winter's cold reminders
   Piled high
      On February's corners.

The melt will be as slow
   As an old Quaker woman
      Taking measure
Of her young daughter's
      Latest suitor.

This is the way the world ends:
By straight razor or broken glass;
One more foot of snow this winter
And I'm leaving as soon as I can;
Off to Bermuda, Cancun, or Diamond Head,
Anywhere the sun might tan my flesh,
But the next stormy mix promoted by
The weatherman, either he goes or I do,
Though I suspect I am a better assassin
Than I ever will be a suicide.
Just saying, you understand.

A woman's face
Is her entry into the world,
All eyes and lips
And sculpted cheek bones;

Without a proper face,
She will go unnoticed,
Consigned to the back rooms
Of home and commerce.

A man only needs
A deep voice and a shower
To rise through life
And be successful.

A woman must be perfumed
And properly accessorized,
If she is to make her mark:
The playing field is not level.

Still I would not be a man
If you made me
President of the World.

This is how the offensive begins,
The Coalition, such as it is,
Sweeps across Marjah in a bid
To secure control for the West
And the Afghan Government,
Such as it is.

American Marines and Afghan troops
Flow into the Helmand river valley
To confront a thousand Taliban
Protected by a network of canals
And heavily mined fields and roads,
No one ever said this would be easy.

Together the British,
The Americans, and the Afghans
Battle the insurgents and fanatics
Who would rule Afghanistan;
This time it would be different,
New roads, new schools,
New health clinics and secure homes,

This time we will keep
Our quickly given promise,
This time we will stay,
This time we will finish
The job we set out to do,
Unless still another President
Doesn't have the brains
Or cojones for the job.

What happens if the answers are bigger than our questions,
If the universe proves larger than the earth's local gods,
What then?  Do we reboot the human animal or do we pretend
We never saw the answer and continue on our merry way?
The road to Oz is paved with a billion good intentions
Executed poorly by a species who all too often refuses
To look in the closet and see what may be lurking there.

When the revolution ended,
We went our separate ways,
One girl travelled to Blue Mongolia,
Another got married and moved
To a Northern Town with her husband,
One of us got fat, one us became
Exactly like the people we said we hated;

But most of us drifted in and out of our studies,
Got real jobs and on with our families;
I had my babies, moved to the mid-Atlantic,
And eventually became a damn good poet,
Surviving years beyond what any of us
Thought possible in the violent bloody days
That were nineteen hundred and sixty eight.

Women of model height,
Not NBA, not amazon,
Discover that men,
Vertically challenged,
Often exhibit anger
At any woman who'd dare
Be taller than any man,
Even one with the
Emotional equilibrium
Of a 12 year old pubescent
Awash with the aftermath
Of his first ever erection.

Palermo rests between two mountains
In a golden valley that once grew citrus;
When my grandparents left
At the turn of the last century,
Organic trees still thickly scattered
Up and down the ancient farmland,
Glistening fruit against dark green leaves.
The rumble of Mount Etna,
The rattle and quake of the earth itself,
Are commonplace among other disasters:
The possibility of death is seldom more distant
Than the next warm breath escaping from your lips.

On my thirteenth birthday I knew
That in three years I would have my license;
It seem so far away but not as far as college,
And I had to get through the eighth grade first
So I could graduate and get on with high school.
I wanted to tell my mother
My body was turning out wrong,
I am a girl, no matter what it looks like,
But my lips would not speak the words.
Alone in my bed as the breeze from the bay
Blew through the warm Sacramento evenings,
The path from there to where I now write
Did not seem to exist:
My pillow grew wet with my frustration
As I cried out for the gods to change me.
But they never did.

My brother turned sixty the other day,
Gray haired, what there is of it,
And various other ailments he's collected
Over a half dozen decades, here and there;

I am his older sister, life is full of surprises,
Hair still mostly brown and in place,
Who would have thunk we'd make it here,
The 1950s are so far away.

But he's alive and I'm alive,
We're racing each other to a hundred;
Who knows how it will end, I might let him win,
As long as he greets me at one twenty.

We're only halfway there.