Cream City Bricks

The grade school on 18th Street

had the same hard black brick

as all the others, charcoal outside,

soft and yellow inside.

The hallway walls wore

crayon meanderings, up

the warm, wooden stair to the third

grade, where Miss Schneider

read us stories—gave out

gold stars I coveted

in neat lines next to my name

on her clean white chart.

I didn't know about the

buttery insides of bricks till David,

the kid with buckteeth,

who died driving drunk

somewhere in Saigon,

threw stones at me and missed,

taking golden chips

out of the dark façade.

The year they sand-blasted the courthouse

we went downtown on the bus

every Saturday

to see the next installment of gold appear,

like sunrise slowly crawling

over that domed horizon.

Even South Division High,

where I left my illusions,

came clean under the harsh interrogation

of sand and steam.

But always, in a year or so,

the dark effects of weathering

crept back,

smeared over the brick

like a scum of dirt and straw that

floats on new milk in the pail.

In the dairies, my uncles

skimmed milk, turned cream

into pale Wisconsin butter,

then came home to complain of cows,

low wages, and hippies

in the old neighborhood bars.

I loved those East-side bars—

biker bars squeezed between

the headshops and Watertower Park,

where you could get three good hits of

white-cross for two bucks,

or strawberry mescaline on Sunday,

where we learned to stay away from

crazy Pete’s weed laced with dust.

By graduation I knew three dead boys,

David and Pete and Michael.

Michael, all light and music,

danced his motorcycle

off the 16th Street viaduct.

My dad, who’d never liked long hair,

chanted a new lyric about

murdercycles.

But I remember the vibration

between my thighs

on one forbidden ride

and the heat

of pale, creamy skin

under black leather.

Originally published in Penguin Review, Spring 2006

Dangerous Women

Dangerous Women

We knew them when we saw them,

the ones our mothers

warned us about,

sauntering down our

bare suburban afternoons,

their Marilyn skirts drifting upwards,

lifted by the

light-fingered breeze.

Oh for breasts that touched the sky

at those impossible angles!

If you’d pull two pins, their hair

would tumble down in waves enough

to drown a man’s resolve

and leave him

abandoned

to all the saltier commandments.

(In our mirrors we postured, practicing,

while the grandmothers clucked their tongues.)

When they passed, we sucked in the

hot scents of Opium

and Taboo—and watched

the boys we wanted to know

watching.

Originally published in Penguin Review, Spring 2006

The Woman and the Wool

for Linda, who asked why, in the long list of those who must not

work on the Sabbath, wives were never mentioned.

I have never made a rug.

Never pushed steel hook through reluctant canvas,

or punched in patterns of ancient roses,

water-deep greens and honeyed yellow.

I have not cut yarn into finger lengths of black

for the final fringe.

I did not know the sheep, nor the shearer.

Did not watch the fleece fall

in waves from the knife, or see the lamb leap

free and naked in the early grass. 

But I do know what it is to drop the burden

of heavy locks that weigh down the head,

of a hair-shirt worn too long,

of my feminine sins.

When the time came to the wash wool, I was not there.

Other hands brushed and combed, shaped

long rolags, pulled fibers and twisted.

But I have heard the spinning wheel’s hymn

and tasted the baptism of dye—

the heavy scent of wet wool, of turned earth,

perfume of red madder, of  woad and weld,

the alum acrid as Protestant guilt.

Still the rug at the door is not my rug.

It belongs to the sheep and to the spinster,

to the mother of my grandmother—

she whose arthritic hands, twisted and hooked,

made those roses bloom on a Sunday when

no work, except by the women, could be done. 

originally published in Penguin Review, 2006