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. ****Voted Best Coffee In Ann Arbor**** in the 1998 Michigan Daily readership polls 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 Will never return 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. South U. & East U. 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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