I Don’t Want to Be the Only One Here
I don’t want to be the only one here
dreaming of a seal swimming
under my white sheets,
its blubbery body sliding over my breasts
while the rest of the book club sits in a sensible circle
discussing the book I haven’t read.
I don’t want to wake drenched
in the cold lake of my sweat, off to the bathroom,
where I stare at the back of a Kleenex box,
try to make as many words as I can from the letters
in mouchoirs…in any language I know:
muchos, coros, chorou…many, choirs, cried.
I hear the entire chorus of the Messiah
sinking in the salt water of their own tears,
so that Hallelujah is a slur of garbled drowning scuba divers
like you, floating face down, your body
knocking against rocks at Lover’s Point.
Lover’s Point, the point where love
had no place on that January day,
where the benches memorialize those lost in 9/11-
bodies sailing from burning towers holding hands –
signs of love flung from fire, so unlike
the lonely cold waves of the Pacific.
I don’t want to be the only one here seeing bloated wet blue.
Send me some warm dry lovers, luscious red lips kissing.
published by Typishly 2018
Women Cooking Chicken
How unlike the chicken of my youth these skinless thighs and breasts
severed and tightly wrapped in cellophane, labeled organic and cage free.
Spared the sight of blood and scent of ripened flesh,
I need nothing but a quick hot-wash to plop my pullet in the pan.
At thirteen, my first chicken came without a pedigree,
blanketed in plain pink paper from Ducca’s Butcher Shop.
I stood confronted by a whole chicken, except for head and feet
and the pulled feathers that left her skin erupting just like mine.
I laid her naked on her back across the cutting board,
shoved my hand through the viscous hole between her legs
to retrieve her heart, her twisted neck, whatever giblets were,
My mother put me to this task without instruction,
so my blade landed dull false cuts before I clipped her joints,
divided up the body parts I dusted and dunked in sizzling oil.
So many millions of women in the world
have washed the fetid fat of chicken from their fingers.
I once saw a sugar-cane farmer’s wife on a plantation in Brazil
chase a chicken with her machete, slit its throat.
She wrapped her own legs, ribboned with purple veins,
around a bucket of scalding water to pluck its feathers.
That tough old hen who pecked for scratch
will never sizzle in a frying pan, but boil for hours
to flavor soup to feed a dozen children,
beak and claws afloat, yesterday’s bread sopping up her juice.
As I lay my platter down now upon my table and watch
my daughters’ greasy fingers fiddle with crispy thigh and breasts,
I wonder how, when they are women, they will relate to chickens?
Will they find it too grotesque to touch such flesh, let alone consume it?
Or will a uniformed women wrapping in a factory
make their slaughtered chicken palatable?
published with honorable mention in Passager Books Poetry Prize Collection, 2018
Ruth Mota received her BA in English and her Masters in Public Health. After living in Brazil for a decade and working many years as an international HIV/AIDS trainer, she now resides in the Santa Cruz Mountains and devotes herself to poetry. She keeps her activism alive by leading poetry circles to veterans and men in jail. Her poems have appeared in various on-line and print journals including: The Monterey Poetry Review, Caesura , Quillsedge Press and Passager Books 2018 Poetry Prize Collection. Her poem May Day Kiss will soon appear in Terrapin Books A Constellation of Kisses.
I don’t want to be the only one here
dreaming of a seal swimming
under my white sheets,
its blubbery body sliding over my breasts
while the rest of the book club sits in a sensible circle
discussing the book I haven’t read.
I don’t want to wake drenched
in the cold lake of my sweat, off to the bathroom,
where I stare at the back of a Kleenex box,
try to make as many words as I can from the letters
in mouchoirs…in any language I know:
muchos, coros, chorou…many, choirs, cried.
I hear the entire chorus of the Messiah
sinking in the salt water of their own tears,
so that Hallelujah is a slur of garbled drowning scuba divers
like you, floating face down, your body
knocking against rocks at Lover’s Point.
Lover’s Point, the point where love
had no place on that January day,
where the benches memorialize those lost in 9/11-
bodies sailing from burning towers holding hands –
signs of love flung from fire, so unlike
the lonely cold waves of the Pacific.
I don’t want to be the only one here seeing bloated wet blue.
Send me some warm dry lovers, luscious red lips kissing.
published by Typishly 2018
Women Cooking Chicken
How unlike the chicken of my youth these skinless thighs and breasts
severed and tightly wrapped in cellophane, labeled organic and cage free.
Spared the sight of blood and scent of ripened flesh,
I need nothing but a quick hot-wash to plop my pullet in the pan.
At thirteen, my first chicken came without a pedigree,
blanketed in plain pink paper from Ducca’s Butcher Shop.
I stood confronted by a whole chicken, except for head and feet
and the pulled feathers that left her skin erupting just like mine.
I laid her naked on her back across the cutting board,
shoved my hand through the viscous hole between her legs
to retrieve her heart, her twisted neck, whatever giblets were,
My mother put me to this task without instruction,
so my blade landed dull false cuts before I clipped her joints,
divided up the body parts I dusted and dunked in sizzling oil.
So many millions of women in the world
have washed the fetid fat of chicken from their fingers.
I once saw a sugar-cane farmer’s wife on a plantation in Brazil
chase a chicken with her machete, slit its throat.
She wrapped her own legs, ribboned with purple veins,
around a bucket of scalding water to pluck its feathers.
That tough old hen who pecked for scratch
will never sizzle in a frying pan, but boil for hours
to flavor soup to feed a dozen children,
beak and claws afloat, yesterday’s bread sopping up her juice.
As I lay my platter down now upon my table and watch
my daughters’ greasy fingers fiddle with crispy thigh and breasts,
I wonder how, when they are women, they will relate to chickens?
Will they find it too grotesque to touch such flesh, let alone consume it?
Or will a uniformed women wrapping in a factory
make their slaughtered chicken palatable?
published with honorable mention in Passager Books Poetry Prize Collection, 2018
Ruth Mota received her BA in English and her Masters in Public Health. After living in Brazil for a decade and working many years as an international HIV/AIDS trainer, she now resides in the Santa Cruz Mountains and devotes herself to poetry. She keeps her activism alive by leading poetry circles to veterans and men in jail. Her poems have appeared in various on-line and print journals including: The Monterey Poetry Review, Caesura , Quillsedge Press and Passager Books 2018 Poetry Prize Collection. Her poem May Day Kiss will soon appear in Terrapin Books A Constellation of Kisses.