A Picnic, At Dinnertime, Your Lower Lip, Wetback

This first post will have four poems, one old and three new, all dealing more or less with relationships and food.

#1
A Picnic

We savor the juicy lunacy of our tuna
sandwiches, sliced neatly down the middle.
Such a thing should not make sense
This is meat, long dead, packed in a can.
This is mayonnaise, greasy, squeezed from plastic
This is delicious, you and I
One half down our gullets, we are incomplete,
our sleepy eyes not yet in sync.
We sink our teeth into our other halves
and are made whole.

* * *

(This is probably the poem that I'm most proud of, out of all I've got. The title is the one thing that I'm not happy with.)

#2
At Dinnertime

Clever cleaver,
how it parts the portions
between us, without ever really trying.
Wise as Solomon, swift as a whisper;
with a sharp wit and its own slight weight
it sings its way through bone.

We do not share this meal;
we conquer it, divide it.
The cleaver brokers the peace,
So we sit, silent, and eat.


#3
Your Lower Lip

There are times when I fasten my teeth around your lower lip and I think to myself,
“Why let go?”

Why not bite down,
chew and swallow,
and keep at least this much of you with me,
forever.

Then you make a noise, and I remember that I kind of like your lips where they are.

* * *
(This one, to me, is kind of on the borderline, in terms of whether or not to include it. If I, by some miracle, write a lot of really good poems, I might leave it out. But we'll see where I stand in a month. If I use it, I'm not sure about the line breaks - the long lines are mean to be read as straightforward statements, while the shorter ones are a little more drawn out.)

#4
Wetback

What is the first thing you remember?
Was it a game of peek-a-boo?
Sneaking looks through a hole in a ratty blanket?
Were you stung by a bee?
Did you cry, and cry, as the little red lump swelled on your skin?
Did you pick up a fallen feather?
Did you stroke it until your mother grabbed your arm and told you
not to touch such dirty things?

My first memory was a family picnic
in a public park, somewhere in Rockland County.
I was four, and we were four,
my parents, my sister, and me.
We met another family, visitors from Spain
and spoke Spanish with each other,
stretched out on the lawn.

I remember four boys on bicycles,
how they circled us like Great Whites,
sniffing for blood.
“Spics,” they spat, and “wetbacks,” too.
“Why don’t you go home,” they said, and pedaled off,
laughing

Now, when the rednecks and townies get me down,
I close my eyes and try to remember what happened
before those boys showed up.
It’s hard to hold on to, but if I can find it,
there’s a moment in my mind,
a darkening window to a purer time
when I didn’t know what it was to be harassed for simply speaking,
for simply being

* * *
(I cut the end of this poem from my initial draft, but I think I could cut it off even earlier. based on a conversation with a Hannaford grocery worker. But with the less rambling version, "rednecks and townies get me down" might seem incongruous. What do you think?)