These are a few of the poems I wrote about adjusting to moving out here. I think they’re pretty self-explanatory:
Suburbia
Little neighbor girl as I take
out the recycling: “Hello.
I like your high heels.”
All of seven, she darts away,
but I stay, frozen at the curb.
I’m thirty-one, newly divorced
wrestling a busted metal frame
in black satin pumps
and trendy vintage dress,
half my assets half a country
away, a quarter the woman I was.
It doesn’t even register at first.
I’m not a parent or a teacher
or other authorized personnel
permitted to talk to strange
children. I live a life devoid of
censors or moral fiber
though rife with whimsy.
*
The Eight O’Clock Set
The woman at the bakery
greets each customer in turn
out of fealty. Adherence to
protocol. Few register her.
I’d felt her voice as one senses
changes in air temperature,
raising suspicion of ghosts,
flanked by the eight o’clock set
bustling towards their office jobs.
Since moving to the city,
every day has been
a grand awakening
over and over.
I live with three other beautiful
perverts in an idyllic house
in the suburbs, where they’ll fine
you for not cutting your grass.
Heteronormative this morning,
a woman in monochrome
with no wedding ring,
I move my tongue inside
my mouth, remembering
an engineer clamping clothespins
there and there and there,
his eyes moist as he guided me
through my pain.
It’s not something that translates well
but you need to carry the currency
of the country you’re in.
This life engineered by the
future, I’m pinpointed, skewered
like the insects we kept in jars
specimens under glass.
At the bakery, I buy boiled
eggs set like testicles in their
tiny plastic container.