Sticky summers provide
the usual souvenirs:
Tan, crisp faces
pockets scratchy with sand
and countless heart-biting, igniting images
of boys in bookstores and in buses
stooped over novels with jagged names
lips sparkling with pricks of blood.

These darling invite lavender-pink dreams
to feed the fat vacancies between our thoughts and
tirelessly, we imagine when our paths might crash
arousing love-sparks to gallop free
so we, too, might
leap.

Soon we will experience
the slap-sting of beautiful boys
who feign interest just to prove they can
seduce us into a face-slam
with a pole,
or an ouch-slip into a ditch.
While rubbing our bruises
and brushing off wormy dirt clods,
We will glance at him, suddenly strong, a phoenix born from the ashes of heart-burn

And think:
Did the lumps in our throats betray our careless expressions?

You drive me nuts--
almonds, cashews, pecans
prickly with salt
the Planters Premium kind
that look better than they taste
and lie about the ZERO trans fat
(in the shower, I can no longer count my
toes)
You forced the pecans onto my palms.
I thought they looked like dead
Cockroaches.

My grandmother
wears her hips
clean
like cantaloupes
her breasts droop:
swelling, full-buttomed eggplants.
Her thighs are large, liquid and
smooth. But her fingers are crooked and her knees
breaking.
She leans forward to
ease my grandfather out of his seat,
grapefruit-gut and all.
He distributes
silky, slippery burps
that smell of dinner's stringy
roast beef. Sometimes, my grandmother
embraces a frown. She scoots wrinkles into her forehead
and her eyebrows meet halfway.
A moment.

Then that smile returns.
Sour cheeries.