Santa Fe Poetry Broadside
Issue #15, April, 2000 : --  1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12
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Women Becoming Poems:
Ellen Andolsek

                 

Rainy Sunday

With a carton of old photos
you're looking for clues again.
You call me in to see you at twelve,
skinny little ant-boy on a bike.
With a gust of laughter you exclaim,
what an asshole!
for the pouffy hair you had
and the white jacket with no shirt
the summer of eighty four.
But happy! such tender
stoned smiles you had
there, for instance, on a fishing boat,
blue-eyed, tan-chested
hard nicks of muscle between ribs
iridescent along the outline
like a plum.

Happy. Now you're lost
smiling back into an expression
so implacably soft
I think you've unreeled
to a time years before me,
stolen off to share a laugh
with the boy you were
who baits you from these snapshots
with that recurrent smile,
with a silent, hilarious
punch-line. An inside joke
he knew would really get a laugh
from the man you've become.


1999



Copyright © 2000 Ellen Andolsek.

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Issue #15, April, 2000 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.