The odd couple

they were an odd couple,
sitting on the stoop tonight.
he needed dental work and she
desperately needed a nose job.
in the morning, the squirrels will
awaken and get to work, first
pulling his bottom tooth, then
the two uppers; she will watch
with that same look of surprise
until they turn their attention
to her, their tummies filling
quickly with succulent
pumpkin flesh.

The Cookie Thief

she was the penultimate soccer mom,
four kids and a mini-van, blonde,
a body that did yoga four
times per week when the babysitter
was over and she could sneak away.
she had one dirty secret.
she never brought cookies to
the kids’ events at school, or
presents for other children.
instead, she carefully packaged
extra cookies at the end of every
event, the ones that other mothers had
slaved over, between rushing home
from their jobs, guilt driving them
to bake til the last moment in order
to bring something to the school event.
no, this mother grabbed the aluminum
foil from those mothers hoping to
bring their few leftovers home, she
wrapped their leftovers carefully,
arranging the left over juices, cake,
cookies and books in her large
plastic box and headed out while
the other mothers could only stand
speechless, watching their cookies
drive away in the white mini-van.

Merci a CH pour cet histoire..c’est vrai!

Handwriting

he called to tell me
he received my postcard,
but he couldn’t read it.
something about my handwriting
being so terrible, not being able
to read more than a few words.
I said I wouldn’t write anymore
and he didn’t like that either,
so I promised to print, or
try anyway.
I’ve heard all this before,
but I can’t remember
where

Appointments

she made all the appointments after
her friend told her his cancer was found
in a routine screen at age 58.
the dentist, the orthodontist, two
other tests that she would rather
keep private, she’s a modest woman.
all this poking and prodding is quite
unwelcome, but she knows
she has responsibilities and her
children would be quite annoyed
with her if she keeled over well
before her time should be up.

The Run on Sentence Girl

she wrote to me asking me
for help editing her paper, that
was for an application to a
university she had spent the summer
at several years ago and she liked
the campus and now she thought:
oh I will apply there; what a good
place to go to graduate school and
after all, the weather is better than in
Massachusetts where she currently
studies climate science, but maybe it
is not as good a school as the
one in Washington where it rains a lot,
or even staying in Cambridge, and so she
reminds herself that such grand decisions
should not be affected by the weather, but
rather by where she grew up and did research and now
she is writing essays that her mother edits,
mostly by deleting colons and semi-colons
and putting
in lots of
periods.

the dancer

so elegant
the skirt of her red
dress flaring
she twirls her lithe
body around him
lifting her towards
the sky her head
drops back
she smiles

but is it art

on the half hour
the docent attached a handle
to the gears and spun a
small aquarium round and round,
the heavier blue liquid
being spun out to the
sides while a video camera
captured the crowd gathered
around, displaying the images
on an adjacent white wall.
the aquarium slowed down
over the next few minutes
and we wandered off
wondering is this art