My guest

MJM

Woman to Woman

In a Year of the Monkey a decade later, I spend
days sketching pictographs of foremothers
on sacred stones outside my home: Honor, Health,
Compassion, Imagination, Knowledge, Loyalty,
Art, Whimsy, Beauty, Laughter, Love. I birth
bottle rockets, scrawl Serendipity in flagrant
Oriental Red across my breasts to scare the beast.
I invite my Sicilian neighbor to Guo Nian.
She says I'm crazy and she doesn't eat Moroccan.

~ MJM, March, 2001

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The Harlot Visits the Cemetery

she was getting her just desserts. If they had known.
But no one knew. There were cigarettes then, too --
afterwards; vintage merlots -- before. And a journal
he shared with only her. The same book

she has tucked beneath the leather jacket she wears.
Pictures of his performance on stages in New York.
Leaping lightly from the wooden floor. Dance
itself. Photos of poise suspended in mid-

flight. And personal thoughts he chose to record
before a wife, a lover and a mortgage befuddled him.
She'd stolen nothing but love, so she believed
she had a right to slip the journal from the shelf.

Everyone else at the wake was preoccupied
with the widow, and hams, hugs and flowers.
No one realizes the harlot needs comforting
as well. She couldn't fall to her knees.

She couldn't wail too loud or too long;
had no right to a public display of dramatics.
In the cemetery after everyone has gone,
she falls to her knees, wails too loud, too long,

flogs the freshly mounded earth with her fists.
She needs to pull him from the ground, pound
his skeletal chest, demand to know why
he'd chosen to die as he had lived. The dance

suspended in mid-flight. Those riding past
mistake her for a widow getting her just desserts.
Exhausted, she rolls from her knees to sit
with her back against his headstone for support.

Opens the journal, reads his own intents aloud
to him; lights cigarette after cigarette. Reads until
his virtue freezes solid in a frigid November wind.

~ MJM, September 13, 1998

(Featured from 8/2000 to 12/2000 at The Poet's Porch)

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(formerly titled: "Where I'm From")
Absentminded flips through canvases
at the sidewalk sale offer little
beyond Gauguin- and Matisse-like
reproductions selling by the pound
like flounder at the fishmonger's.

Pitiful imitations of the masters.
Slightly raw, left to rot unnoticed
like a bunch of half-eaten halibuts
flopping in the back of the fridge.

I stumble upon a canvas
unlike all the others. Finely crafted,
labored over laboriously; no detail left
uncooked, brush strokes meld to linen.
The view is from the patio

of a chalk-colored villa set on a crevice
in the cliffs. White sails bob
in the harbor below, black hibiscus blooms
in all the flowerpots. The sea is a hue
that hasn't been born yet.

A single deck chair lounges
naked and turning tan; the crystal glass
of Beaujolais begs the sapphire sky
to take a dip, tint its liquid purple as a plum.

"This is where I'm from," I announce.
"I thought you were born in New Jersey?
That definitely ain't New Jersey,"
you rudely remind me.

I prop the canvas upright on the cement,
step inside the landscape. Strip off
my clothing, pick up my glass of wine.
Drink the whole of it deeply,
own the harbor of where I'm from.

~ MJM, August 30, 1998
 
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Lipstick is mother, flirt, arrow, wine,
knife -- a weapon masquerading as a beauty
enhancement product. Armed with a phallus
such as this, the last thing women
should be accused of is penis envy

~ MJM on September 12, 1998

(Featured in the February 2001 edition of Mentress Moon)

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~ MJM, June 10, 1998
 
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