WOONSOCKET

Little Woonsocket, little Woonsocket, you’re still figuratively bigger
than a Pomeranian or an Indigo Bunting,
and plumbers here a century back moved out
on horse-drawn carts and carried decent rubber plungers
underneath their hairy arms, and they sported rubber boots
that many-a-time father made to double
as waders come Rhode Island’s snarking trout season.

Little Woonsocket, little Woonsocket, I screamed into town this morning
as two rippling, chunky women were doing boom-box calisthenics
at the end of the open road, up against the city’s lesser gates,
and the only thing I had in my car to barter oral pleasure
was a one-third empty jeroboam of Carlo Rossi red,
though as shit and sweet fortune would have it,
that was more than enough to spear the black girl’s thong
for later framing and ridiculous mounting
as high as I can reach up walls in daddy’s fireplace-d den.

PIGEON

‘Tis a hot day in the city, ‘tis, ‘tis, ‘tis,
hunting feathers with wife number-one
(she of the Left Eye Lopes look
and a leathery-weathery time-worn ass,
and a heart big enough to thump-thump-thump
for tragedies and charity—
oh look at how she pulls her hand
away from far within my fly
to spear and then tilt her open purse,
that coins drop down to a beggar’s feet).

At four-thirty or thereabouts,
we’ll quit and pool both bags to one, one, one.
My sweating bounty will be kind of meager:
lots of pigeon feathers, a seahawk pinion
from near the harbor, a chartreuse plume
of obviously appareled origin.
I foresee she’ll open up with something special
off a falcon, then a tail feather from a squawk-
squawk-squawking seagull, but just like mine,
her take will be overwhelmingly pigeon.

SEXIST LINES ABOUT THAT HEARTBREAKER MARY

1. I  Just Can’t Picture

I think that first fall I credited
changing leaves with more vivid color
than they had had since Mary the Burmese
took her huge tits with her to Laramie
when she Greyhound there with cowboy Edgar.
But in years two and three, the leaves slipped back
to their pastel persuasions, and then last year
(when I confess I really wasn’t up
in Quebec chopping pine), I cracked the ice
with an Australian nurse in a clinic outside
Baltimore, though I judge nothing special’s going
to happen now to any of my natural surroundings.
However, slim Canberran hips ain’t no way
a fair exchange for pudding-soft Myanmar breasts,
even if in the hundreds of times I’ve tried,
I just can’t picture Mary coming back.

2. The Poet-Pilot Reconnoiters

Cumulous clouds look white-stone solid
till I mash right through ‘em and come roaring back out
to nothing sky again, and of the four dots down there
riding in keen pasture, cowboy Edgar is the endmost dot
from my writing hand. Mary’s not along this afternoon,
and believe me, I could easily tell were she pushing into
the dark green grass of Laramie, so even though I’ll tip
my cowardice and reveal to everyone
I often have no gonads for completing what I start,
nonetheless, this is about shifting my Cessna
into a sweet and furious motion, and now I’m diving
just right to decapitate the cowboy.

3. The Poet-Barman Reconsiders

Showing a let’s-pretend-about-your-age-body-
and-nationality substitute for Mary
the ropes on how to mix your standard cocktails
and then smartly trot them out in Daisy Dukes
to the aviary where darting rice birds and bullying
crows align for serious battle over neat martinis
and sloppy gibsons, I’ll still be leaving all my worldly
goods to Mary and her coaster-spanning areolas,
even though dick-heavy cowboy Edgar eludes
my foaming and screaming radial engine,
even though he surgically parts that chest
and reaches inside to hold her heart.

4. Bringing Mary Home

When once non-bumptious and overflowing Mary
went along with me and got up on our kitchen table so
I could tongue her and slobber in all the neglected places,
I figure her upraised arms triggered tropic blessings,
for from that time forward, her breast milk tasted
of mango and papaya big-time, and by that reason alone,
I kept her pregnant a ton of days over the next few years.
I love to think she’d still be in a family way by me
and still barefoot on my oaken table
had not cowboy Edgar chanced into the room one day
as I was downing tropic milk, but god knows this verse
ain’t no way whatsoever about the cowboy
and his thieving habits. But I’m going to corral several
of my writings into an explanatory/promotional package
and then disseminate those pages like Kleenex in the air
to raise funds for a real expedition to Laramie,
where first I’ll shotgun Edgar off the planet and then bring
a grateful, smiling Mary home to her kitchen table.

5. Mary Sewing

Cicadas instead of parka buttons, I swear that’s what Mary
traps and sews on this summer, as each day filters
through our bedroom screens, and we charcoal sketch
walruses lolling on prairie grass and prepping themselves
for the flap-and-tusk assault I’ve ordered
against the cowboy’s bunkhouse. ‘Only thing is,
it’s taking too long for hostilities to materialize,
and by the time everyone’s good-to-go,
I can picture Edgar with Mary’s tits billowing about
his nostrils once more and being hundreds of miles
to the north of where these locusts-in-the-thread
flaunt wings that won’t stop opening and closing.

AFTERNOON WINE TASTING

Some screaming colossus of an asshole brought her alligator to the wine tasting, and she wasted no time eyedropper-drizzling malbec-after-malbec off the mugger’s nostrils, but it didn’t take much for a few of us to figure that the croc had yearning only for the pinot grigio, by which we meant it kept reeling out its long, long leash and crawling ‘round and ‘round the white-grape table, before at last it dropped back several steps and simply paused and maybe sniffed. It kind of waited and catnapped, the jagged low relief of its hide having a sheen in the ambient light, and the caiman’s color being close to an army green, a smudged army green. Then it stormed forward and head-butted the legs of the table with real force, whereby bottles and glasses went flying and crashing against the wall and onto the floor. Without any pause or prep, the gator plodded through the wreckage over and over, keeping its purplish snout twisting in and against the wetness of the stained tablecloth and the broken glass. It thus continued wine tasting for but a tad less than the next half hour, or just until the pale light of late afternoon quit flooding a sizeable sector of the room via several curtain-less windows. The beast’s patient owner then decided the time was approaching for beddy-byes, and so she began the awkward process of calming her pet down and helping it disentangle its leash. Soon she was able to escort it out to the parking lot and leverage it into the back of her pickup truck; she then hopped in and started the ignition, turned on her headlights, and headed for home.

UNTITLED

Before I had even finished packing for Juarez,
I slipped on a mantel of authority (it fit me beautifully, by the way,
especially around the arms), and I left written orders
in the bunkhouse that I wanted your cowboys to begin sparking
frogs whenever and wherever, first, they heard them in the evening,
and then they searched and located them throughout the night.
I mentioned I really hoped the sparking process itself
wouldn’t result in gaudy flares being discharged into the atmosphere,
or heat lightning being tumbled along the horizon lines—
i.e., Let me labor this point again: we have to be sub rosa here,
and we don’t want to risk looking like the cause of sporadic spikes
in the number of flash-related events happening in your area.
I also jotted down that to my mind, toads were not frogs,
and as such, they weren’t to be included—
they certainly were not going to count—
and to spark them unnecessarily would be wanton callousness.

William C. Blome writes poetry and short fiction. He lives wedged between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is a master’s degree graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine little mags as Amarillo Bay, PRISM International, Fiction Southeast, Roanoke Review, Salted Feathers and The California Quarterly.