2 Poems by
Tania Rochelle
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MARGARITAS
Beri is the funniest girl in the world.
Kathy's been a little depressed.
Josie's just gotten off work
counseling rapists and pedophiles,
and because it is still the March
of my thirty-third birthday,
we're sitting on the patio of El Toro,
drinking grande margaritas on a Tuesday night,
discussing the elusive concept of sober sex
while our waiter runs the chips-and-salsa
relay so he doesn't miss a word.
For Josie and me, newly single after a decade,
like planets slung off our axis,
and Kathy, of ruler-strict Catholic upbringing,
sex intrigues us like a foreign language.
But Beri, married for more than four years,
is having a hard time remembering sex at all,
its permutation of limbs, its wet rock and slide,
though she pretends, and doesn't know I see
she's counting under the table--
best I can figure, it was Christmas,
Charles's tired stocking stuffer
offered up like a diamond necklace.
Josie says it takes three martinis
to forget the day's fun accounts
of rodents and rectal thermometers;
Kathy needs five beers on an empty stomach
to get past god, his son, and the holy ghost;
and I'm thinking half a bottle
of a decent dry white, I'll relax a little
about the popped balloons of my breasts,
the post-caesarian belly battle zone
my husband traded in for a twenty-year-old
with a moonpie face and perky ta-ta's.
The waiter smiles a young Spanish smile
that tells us he understands this English perfectly,
understands our need for extra sour cream,
and suddenly, we're appreciating the fit of his apron
over tight black jeans, the neon sombrero
glow washing over our enchiladas,
the low night rumble of practical sedans
burrowing back to the suburbs
like guilty fathers, and the clear constant moon,
with its gathering of all things oozing and flowing,
that keeps us glued together. We've fallen
silent as the empty fishbowls,
in which swim our dreams of love
in dregs of salt and citrus, when Kathy says,
You have to really trust a man to have sober sex.
PRAYER
Let me hide here, then,
while my children improvise
a childhood. Occasional
father-riff, chorus
of stubborn grandmothers.
Let me claim the poem
was calling, its cries at night,
its need to be nursed
like the newly born, and soothed
like the dying.
Let my children keep
distant, quiet. Leave me
to what cannot bleed, can't
be disappointed.
Let me fix their suppers, scrub
their backs and turn
them into bed another night
closer to adulthood. Like words
coaxed from the white page,
like the forgotten line.
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