Untitled #1
Something about
“The unending fight for our rights:” once at my school
a man was fired from his job
Teaching multimedia, now
“Ex-Computer Lab Gay.”
Last year I saw him
and his partner at the cinema
they smiled warmly but his face
looked a little older
I waved and sauntered on
Something about
“The tall girl in the overalls” and some class notes
copied over in my kitchen
By small, sturdy hands
With shortly cropped nails
I wanted to tell her
she had chalk on her nose
I stared at it as her pen bore into
my spare notebook
And I grinned like a child
Something about
“I wanna cook you breakfast” and an aimless walk
in the chill of spring at midnight
She shivered, but assured me
It was not too cold
We stopped to share
at quiet length, our greatest silly fears,
from sturdy metal boxes opened
only in intimate moments
Shrugging and shuffling our feet
Something about
Her “shortcut to the Bagel Shop” and a DiFranco song
played especially for us girls
By the older woman
Whom I paid for our lunch
After we argued
for nearly five minutes
to determine who would gain
the privilege of paying
Blushing at our obviousness
Something about
“Real life,” “the nuclear family” and her sweatshirt
hiding her tortured expression
And I punched her
As hard as I could
While some other driver
of some other Ford would grab her hood
away from her eyes and her hair
and kiss her, hard
I did not reach for her slighted arm
Something about
Overalls that are the color of wet hay, and her old shoes
Which had holes, were a size too big
And I wore them
For a full month
Before some alien dress
in a new used car put them in a bag,
borrowed my screwdriver to
affix its new license plate
And drove back to Bakersfield
Something about
My “indiscretion about ‘what we were’” and I faltered;
I can’t avoid a direct question
I apologized
Staring up and left
At a shelf full of books
about Tolerance, Equality, and Reason
ancient works of brilliance
with un-creased bindings
By those who weren’t afraid of truth