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*

Oh hi.

Remember when I used to post poems on here all the days? I wanna do that more. So here are two poems. I'm took a poetry class this semester and my writing has taken a step up, I hope. Here are two compositions based on exercises we did in class.

A Father and Ballerina in a Grocery Store

“She’s beautiful,” she says.
Her arms are long and slender,
and in the tilt of her head,
there is something of the swan.
He cannot take his eyes
away from her neck.
He addresses it shyly.
“She’s new.”
Foolish words, he thinks.
All babies are new.
It’s what defines a baby.
But the woman laughs,
and reaches past him
for a tomato,
and the hairs on his arms do
pirouettes.
His daughter’s eyelashes
brush her own cheeks
four times briefly
before she sighs
and turns her head to the side.
They both watch her.

The woman takes
the tiny hand.
“She has a dancer’s fingers.”

“So do you,” he replies.
Foolish, he thinks.
But she smiles at him
and then at the baby.

And for a moment,
he is the prince
and she is the swan
and they are smiling
at their own perfect daughter.

Emilia whimpers
and he remembers his wife.
At home, un-showered,
waiting in sweat pants
for him to return with tomatoes.


I Would Have Married Him Twice

His face seemed four feet tall.
Squinting one eye
(to indicate his emotion),
he curled his lip and growled
“Sus ojos!”

His compadre squinted one eye and drawled
“The Grasshopper, amigo? Is that all we have?”

“Si. That character stuff
was just kind of
my inference on it.”

There was a sign
on the truck out back.
“Do not crawl
under raised body.
It may drop and
kill you.”

“You are the chemical suppression, tio.
YOU are The Grasshopper, amigo.”

“Si. I am the echoes
in the empty lecture hall, compadre.”

One wife turned to the other
and sighed.
“Mi esposo is an absurdist.
Had I known before the wedding…”

* I've never actually slammed. In the poetry sense of the word. I'm intimidated by it, but I wanna try sometime.

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