POEM

My people are never the same in memory.

They are the dead come back for a picnic, a table set with plates of sliced apples. I am there somewhere hidden in a tree.

In my luckless twenties, still raw from heart-break and prone to constant hard-ons, I watched through an open window a woman, middle-aged, naked, except for her utilitarian bra and panties.

Her hair, teased like a hive of cotton candy, eyelids, a heavy purple coat. I could almost smell her--vivid as my first kiss: Maile L. who had in her mouth some cinnamon Red Hots.

The woman's lipstick was thick like car wax red and cheap in a dime store way. She was fitting to go to work at some diner.

I was then a college intern for the lame duck from my district. I was eager for everything I imagined this woman could teach me. This was in the city of Cain where we kept the doors unlocked for alien thoughts to enter.

If she were the first woman, would that make me the snake? See, the snake in the garden was a real smoothie with a killer pickup line. Me, I was just a salamander on a leaf.

This, before I learned my left from my right, Rilke from Roethke, Keats from Yeats. And many more years followed when I didn't understand a thing completely. Memory is another name for ghosts and their awful hunger.

By Eugene Gloria