Popped cherry

Since this is my first 'blog entry' I thought it would be appropriate to post something in the name of showing your bones, unabashed honesty. So here are two poems I wrote in Tania's poetry class I took about a year ago.

Pop-Up Blocker

My brain would sweat
Anytime my mom announced
“We need to have a talk.”
Found beer cans, missing liquor bottles,
Or curious credit card statements,
I quickly prepared my usual fiction.
But this was a new one.

My mom matter-of-factly explained
She had discovered hundreds of gay porn
Websites were viewed on her computer.
A flashback of pop-ups flooded my mind:

Hot and hungry for cock?
Gang bangs galore!
Chicks with dicks!?
Lick my backdoor.

Mom said “Pornography
will distort your ideas about sex.”
I mumbled I’m sorry
Not knowing what for.
She needed an explanation,
As if I had jacked off to:

Butt bangers ball!
Cum thirsty for ten
inches of throbbing
Latino men,

Accidentally.



Pieces of my Mother

My mother’s thick skin remains
In a petite box on my bookshelf,
Always protecting me from pain.
I also claimed the ashes of her eyes
So precise at marking truth and lies.

Her considerate heart with all its blood
Burned into a million pieces
And placed on top of my brother’s TV.
He, the firstborn and recipient
of our mother’s greatest asset
But too numb to yet appreciate
This final present.

Don packed my mother’s breasts in an urn
Seduced to the dining room.
A hidden trophy of their humble marriage.
Piece by piece it becomes clear
These are also ashes of her strong arms,
The builder of his second world.

Aunt Sharon treasures my mother’s ears
In a jewelry box made of stained glass
That listens patiently on her bathroom counter.

My sisters do not decorate
Their homes with her body.
But my mother could have told you that.

As a family,
We scattered my mother’s hands
To feed her famous garden and
Nurse the flowers starved
Of their former beauty.
The next year we let her hair
Blow out with the wind
On the beach that she loved.
Don said sometime we should sprinkle her backbone,
The root of her being,
In Boston where she grew up.
But I think I’ll keep that.