6B - The Michigan Daily - Literary Magazine - Thursday, March 11, 1999
The Michigan Daily - Literary Magazir
After Dinner, September
By Melissa L. Jones
I'll admit, there is a certain transcendence
in licking a peanut butter coated
knife and knowing it's
wrong. But little of the sublime
is to be found in melon
rind. Cheap mustard is as unpalatable as bad poetry
(ill conceived, poorly proportioned, substandard seed, not worth fighting over).
We know for certain .
cigarette butts and garbage disposals
budget and good taste
women and women's work
dish soap and hang nails
don't mix. It means nothing
that I'm standing
over this sink with best intentions.
It overflows and my bank account dwindles.
How to concentrate on bubbles
and sponges when I have
such words to get in the way?
Writers make lousy housewives.
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Integity in a Large Room
By Camille Noe
Never ask a simple question,
For there will be a simple man
Amongst the crowd:
Smoke Signals from
Amelia Earhe art
Race
By Sar
When she saw the jockey
all thoughts of her life
slid away like the clothes
he gently peeled from her that
He'll tell you what he thinks,
Exactly what he thinks, aloud:
By Melanie Kenny
night
Of welfare,
"For the lazy."
Of your dress,
"Much too tight"
And wars,
"Terrific population control."
It will be a complex night.
Seventy sneering men look up at your face,
Because seventy men enjoy a good show.
Control, you say, is power disguised as necessity -
In case they didn't know.
From the crowd comes a cry,
"Control keeps an honest man down!"
You look around the room,
As if there was one around-
Ode to an Eggplant
By Joelle Renstrom
So quickly under flame
your face, caught by the camera's dewy lens,
bubbles to unmatched carbon letter -
a message beyond flesh and your photograph
from you to my trembling hand:
Darling - travels are divine, love the jodhpurs <stop> Will never return <stop>
Reading the signals wastan accident:
affection spilled from a tea cup,
spelled out in sugar-slick leaves.
No, more honest is this - your halo of curls mistaken
for a candle, I lit my match from your flame.
Only then came smoke, caressing my breath,
lonely as a woman dying on a beach.
The tropical twist: you on the island,
Wondering
Why didn't I just have a baby first, like Lindbergh?
That's how Charlie warded off bad luck,
sold his first born and his favoritesilk aviator scarf
to a little dancing man, Rumple-mephisto-skin.
Every engine failure, every blind night choked with fog,
focused on a small, squalling body,
in a wrecked bassinet, drowning
in the baptismal fount of misfortune.
Maybe her husband lay awake til
dawn
fingering his mustache and listening
to crickets
I':
"I MVUST
aT ITS(
--Vince
Cam9pus
EXpLonaTions in
NonTh of Sou
Sunday Sep,
Open Discus
CAVA
JAVA.
2 Locations at the Crossroads
I think of that time I showed up
with a shiny, maroon eggplant.
I wanted to bring you something elegant-
a statue from Benin or champagne glasses
with stems like the necks of swans.
The eggplant was ripe,
swollen like the hood
of a Volkswagen, and gleaming
warm in my hands.
A purple heart.
And you took it as if it were precious-
a newborn baby, a glass egg
and you cradled it, ran your fingers
over its skin.
I saw your face across its back.
We orbited around the stove
in your small kitchen. We breaded it
and fried it up until ripples seared through.
It leaped in the pan as if shocked by currents
and your pupils leaped with it.
Curled in soft blankets
with your finger along my jaw
you thanked me as if
I had given you a violet moon
in the universe of a paper plate.
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741-JAVA
The Michigan Union
Ist Floor, Across from Info Desk
668-6770
On rainy mornings, your words are grainy
frustrated by wind and sea spray.
I tried for sky, thought the gray in my eyes
was a message for night flying, for distance:
the space so far from earth, color evaporates into mist.
Instead, the sea was waiting for me, stills waits.
My dear plane in its cold embrace, my copilot sea-changed.
Only my bones are dry, undressed by sand and ants.
The burning picture hisses and buckles
as bubbles pop open, little mouths that tell your stories-
Remember hands; after everything, hold
these frail instruments in front ofyour eyes,
marvel at such delicate sensors able to sing out altitude
as a body falls through the failed hammock of sky.
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