Peppermint Twist

Second grade, we lived on Cindy Street, cul-de-sac where I rehearsed my confusing life with the usual quilt of friends, freckled, all white, and carrying board games like clubhouse passwords from front yard to back. Risk and Chutes and Ladders. Cootie catchers. We sucked honeysuckle sap like rare elixir from the bush at the bottom of the street where the school bus stopped for us weekday mornings.

There too at the end of our street was with a pond, muddy with pollywogs mimicking our own growth on squat legs. If you turned right at that corner and kept going there was an coveted destination two blocks farther, a house where three playmates mirrored my own sibling trinity of two girls and a boy and the most exotic mother in the entire neighborhood. This woman with yellow hair was bewitching, had a husband of her own, of course, but she bought holiday gifts for a select share of kids in her periphery, presents that surely unsettled our own mothers. Tiny, heart palpitating bunny rabbits at Easter, for example, that grew into large ones that we had to keep caged in the garage feeding them wilted, disgusting smelling lettuce that would've otherwise been discarded.

This goddess of a mother who we all secretly wanted as our own also taught us to dance, the day's most lascivious dance, the Peppermint Twist...

Comments

Shameless Early Promotion

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round symmetric The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day I have breast cancer I say into the receiver [communities must] pool resources How to produce the sounds of the imaging report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening ...

Vessel

Inside I imagine puckered cups of butter cookies nested in paper that releases a sigh But instead there may be fiction within wishes never reciprocated Playbill of redundant arguments One black glove found fraying This vessel on an emptied table solo temptation is labeled with another’s name Guarded initials as if carved in melting snow A tool unsuited to the task of prying open Not yet valentine

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing to certain bards in the back room, entering through the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...

As Mourning Doves Persist

Search This Blog