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What Sex Was ForDid I drive him crazy or was it Vietnam, right out of his college deferral safety net, or was it the foreman job at the turbine, or those frontal nudes I took or what we did on the dining room floor? It was all floor then, a mattress without springs, two chairs and a spool for meals, all ground, not even a rug to soften that basement décor. When men started robbing me and rattling chains it was then I knew there was no safety here. I caught the voices he heard in his ear: The Mafia, Van Gogh, Jesus doused with fear. Bob. There I said it. I loved him in and out the door. We were two Leos in Chicago, 1969. Best in sex and worst in what sex was for. Holy sanity! We loved and lost ourselves pretty expertly. He wrote poetry, taught me to rappel. I haven't forgotten what his touch was for. I have the negatives somewhere, short blond hair. His cock, his sad face looking down across the floor. He feigned insanity as we coached him to avoid the war. He would have served. I couldn't save him. I miss that engineer, that basement where we sank each other's ship, strafed each other's planes, napalmed love and Agent Orange. Chicago Seven trial on the front page. I was the daughter of old Jews. He came from anti- Semitic Connecticut stock. We were each other's curse and Promised Land. He went crazy. His mother was a nurse. We put him on a plane, a casualty of making love not war. |
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Issue #17, September, 2000 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.