Poem of the week

Queen of the Blue Jean Skirt -- by Anthony Butts

The smell of bacon interwoven in the curtains, the curtains around his head
like cloth around the head of a Muslim, the traffic as vibrant as the call to

mosque: this is a world of semblances. His middle-aged breasts, almost
pendulous with weight. His stomach laying like the body of a pocket watch

flung open beneath his shirt. Time is not the exacting taskmaster we’d like
it to be. He would have been the man she’d always dreamt of.

A man with a past, with a sister he’d touched in her sleep, with a mother
who was queen of the blue jean skirt. Sex opens us in ways we could not

have imagined, two boys perched atop her nightgown using a ruler
to pry a better look at her breasts. The silent awe which exists to this day,

just like refusing to admit liking chitterlings or hog’s head cheese. History
can be deleted with “no’s” for only so long before we refocus on what

has been lost: the road becoming a cylinder as we drive, as the cloudy day
diminishes, as the squirrels become shamans disappearing and reappearing

at will. No one owns this road. Who would want it?—the stippled stop sign
sibilance showing the way, the best little men straying no farther than

recollection might allow, their stories getting no deeper than is necessary:
a wife who suspects nothing natural or unnatural, just the usual—a husband

whose eyes may have at once wandered past the jacquard miniskirt as he
wondered the same things he did as a boy, which are not for you to know.