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Two Poems
Alice Friman
Another Senior Dis-count
You know you’ve had it
when the fruit & vegetable guy
at Kroger pats your arm and calls you
Darlin’. You know you’ve had it
when your Victoria’s Secret push-up
pushes up only to spill you out—
two for the price of one.
And although
you know it ain’t over till it’s over,
crossword puzzles and the daily
stability of anti-oxidant, artery-
reaming dinners don’t hack it. Every
saccharine smile you put out there
that says it does is a lie, every arthritic
seize-the-day.
Standing in the dust
of your own implosion, nothing’s
jewel enough to compensate
for the body’s betrayal. Nothing.
Even in the midst of one more
daffodil bobble-headed spring,
there remains the clear cry of the child—
simple as red Crayola. Stubborn as NO.
***
On Attachments
Consider the glove: a miracle
of attachment. Or the vacuum cleaner,
mouth down, sucking through a grin.
Consider the trees, pretending in their
leafy storm September hasn’t started
cutting off supply. Hold on, hold on.
Look, we are not ring-around-a-rosy,
hand in hand by choice connected,
but by button, stitch, rope, or hook
and eye. And I who have made a fetish
of disaster, incubating the croaking ravens
wheeling from gray towers, I tell you,
given need and your sunny honey,
your upholstery tacks of skin to skin
spelling out your unshakable we belong
despite my doom and gloom and time’s
abusive mirror, you should know—
in case you were worried—restraint
leads to passion. Always. If not
for freedom, Love, then for the jailer.
Alice Friman’s newest collection is Vinculum forthcoming in 2011 from LSU Press. Her last book The Book of the Rotten Daughter is from BkMk Press. New work appears in Best American Poetry 2009, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Boulevard. Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, Friman now lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University.
In Posse: Potentially, might be . . .
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