Ann as a mermaid in a hot tub

Ann as a mermaid in a hot tub
Sally as a sea turtle

Finish this in fins
Finis

Finest love of sea
Salt water taffy return to me

Apple wood you be

mine heart hath
Stropped

in its dismay

That lust
Should thus

token you away..

A very woman very woodsman

For Tom Nicholas

Barbie and me

When I was growing up, my best friend Lisa Petrides asked me in fifth grade how people had babies. Being the authority I was at Williamston Elementary School, where my principal, Miss Keen had also been my dad’s first grade teacher, I knew the answer. You know, if you wish hard enough, are married and kiss each other, you will have one. There. She was satisfied. We went back, our skinny little nine-year-old selves, to the playground, galloping with about fifteen girls, playing horses, being herded by some boy who got rooked into being herd master.

When I was thirteen I came across a word in the newspaper that I didn’t know and asked my sister Carol what it as. The word, raped, made no sense to someone like me who read encyclopedias and dictionaries for fun. She explained what it as, and I was shocked and upset. This was not a good way to learn about sex. After, I could hear my parents through the furnace at night in my bedroom of our huge old brick house, and my mother called my father darling. I wished I hadn’t heard that. They rarely even kissed in public.

My mother hated the word sexy, and we couldn’t even say it if we read it in a magazine. It was the 70s, she had three teenage girls, and she was a strict English woman. If we looked at boys out the car window, we would get teased or accused of being boy crazy. That was the worst; how can you not look at people out a window without feeling guilty after that? We were just girls. Ironically, she let me go to a dance at Brook Hollow Country Club in Williamston when I was 12 or 13, where I met my first boyfriend, Roland Abendroth from Haslett. He kissed me at the dance and later asked me to go steady on the phone. We went steady for one whole week without seeing each other again. My mom let me go to a street dance in Williamston the summer I was fourteen. They were early events, and I met my next boyfriend, Bob Allen later a Vice President at a College in Ohio, who at the time was 16, had graduated high school and was a musician at one of those dances. I got to watch him play at dances at the tennis courts and practice at his friend Eddie Farhat’s, the Shiek’s son’s, house. I couldn’t go on car dates with him at first.

Our clothes soon began to metamorphize into that dreaded word- sexy.
We used to peg our pants and jeans on the sewing machine, taking them in a full inch or more, till they were skin-tight, while also creatively hemming our skirts two or more inches to approximately mid thigh. Another creative dressing ploy we used was to wait till we got to school, button up our cardigan sweaters, roll the waist bands of our skirts over at least twice and pin them with safety pins.

Birds in overgrown under paths in two

Coquette a vin’

In kind

Yore heart
Torpid
In thigh

Trunk
Grill gnarled oak
By me

Baby by mummy
Rockier vin
A’ coyote

Aqua

Crashing down nineteenth

A flower in a nightmare
fever hued

I fall out of my bunk at 5 6 7 8

I am forever to the max

My mother
Washes my face in
=with a cool clothe

Feeds me bread and milk
And tea

Don’ I go again
Like a flower
In that nightmare of fever

Here no
Though dr. masers nurse
Sees I do

Drama unfolds…….

Crashing face down
My life wings bore me
Into your chair

My head unfolds in peacock feathers
Above me
My velvet rabbit coat

Disappears down a hole
Chasing me dignity

With me face glown

Hidden in a hole
Behind your desk
Nariño yr
Computer

My love
Dissolves in
Caves

Flow before me

Like Prometheus unchained
Forever I am chained to you

Dark Side of the Sun

People dream yellow blossom
Know him only
Journey above wander between
The dark side of the sun

Inter is here today
Love is winter sun
We have mating contracts
On the dark side of the sun

Fireflies like diamonds

Jerkin deed in Birkenstocks
You slob on through
In your high class tight as
Sandals without shoes

One dog to the window

A new dog
In the window there
Lovely girl
With

All eyes
And
Harry she is not

Pismo Beach

White Celise