I make a terror of the ground, and: I Was in the Commons Kissing, and Lucy Next to Me Kissing, Too
Rent from DeepDyve- I make a terror of the ground, and: I Was in the Commons Kissing, and Lucy Next to Me Kissing, Too
I make a terror of the ground
What brews here, you think, is a hard green,gnarled and able to grab and pull me down.Do not spill myself here, you think,for who is left to pry me free?
I know your thoughts and tempt youwith a splash of pink to lure you down,your nostrils working madly. Darling Pink,you sing, who planted you for me?
The stirring in your head drives you to ground.This is not my death field, you dream.Keep the nightstand, you cry out.Oh, I am a child unworthy of time.
And so you are. Thus I continue to takeit from you, one second, and another. [End Page 61]
I Was in the Commons Kissing, and Lucy Next to Me Kissing, Too
Both of us under one boy or another.That’s how we spent our senior year,Beacon Hill, Harvard Square,Coolidge Corner, anywherebut Belmont, or Westwood Center.Boylston Street for bongs—ReeferMadness, incense, Yardley’s makeovers,buffalo leather toe sandals—her baby was bornwith encephalocele. While I held her,I hoped she’d die, though tried to love her,four months, she didn’t grow—Lucy rocking her,cooing, passers-by smiled at the handsome mother,then frowned—small gasps—when they looked closer—my father paid for the funeral I don’t remember.(There may not have been one.) Lucy had others—a daughter, next a son, then nine years later,she drowned in Maine, swallowed by the family pond,at barely thirty, while I’m nearing sixty, and complain. [End Page 62]
Martha Rhodes is the author of four collections of poetry: At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance, Mother Quiet, and The Beds. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals as AGNI, Fence, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and others, and in numerous anthologies. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the mfa Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and she is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books.
