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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JENN GUTIERREZ In Youth They hoped you’d wrap yourself about the spine, squeeze syllables from between your thighs on Open-Call Night. Disinterested in what it is like to be a mother—drifting off mid-stanza, to mentally practice their own manuscripts, just as you came to the part about your role as wife. Preferring the pants of your breath against the coiled head of a mic to your rendition of inherited family recipes. That was not what they wiggled themselves down into the first few rows to hear when they first spotted your name on the yellow ledger pad making its rounds, its lines quickly filling with the names of tortured souls just pathetic enough to hear themselves speak in a room full of strangers. Their turns up, they’d peer out at you in ways they would never have had the guts to do otherwise, shielded behind that pseudonym of Art. Once your outward features began its task of wither, they were more apt to listen, but even now, they still appreciate a good mix of nasty, scattered auspiciously into a frisky line or two, thinking it great fun to hear an old woman speak of such things. Crotch Rockets I am driving due West toward the blue ridge monuments of this state fallen against the backdrop of a smoke gray haze some 80 miles per hour and I think— I can’t imagine what it might be like on a bike And then you are eight again and I recognize your Spanish eyes hold with fear the revving excitement hold on hold tight to that black Harley cotton shirt Inhale sweet scented smoke of plant I remember it hummed and rattled between unbroken unspent secrets of back then Like clouds on a heat mirage day a figure emerges out of nowhere whisks mother away— while father was away hush-hush blend it now, vroom-vroom There’s that poem forever mingled with page—a stain while boyhood fantasies imbed in your ever drowning dreams full of ever-evil deeds Like the machine itself so married and seared between the polarities that become you even once defined you No freedom without pain you see the scar a red hot muffler smoking her 18-year-old flesh or the death of a sister’s lover and the road map etched along his buddy’s face No freedom without pain Reminding Forebode And this open highway calls to your father’s hidden ghosts these visions are given not spoken no request has ever been mouthed free— No freedom without pain so married and so scathingly seared. |
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© 2004-2011 Underground Voices |
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