In honor of all I'm thankful for this year: a poem I wrote fifteen Thanksgivings ago when I had just moved to New York City and was still in the habit of chasing love by taking buses down south. Incidentally, it's also the poem where I first wrote of my tenderness towards Hostess cakes. It was published in Washington Square in the Winter of 1997.
Thanksgiving
3 bags of pork
rinds,
6 cans of warm
Pepsi,
18 mentholated
cough drops,
a couple of
HoHo’s, a DingDong,
2 and a half
packs of Marlboros,
and Dee from
Louisville
pressing her
elbow into my ribs,
talking her
hysterectomy,
her 13 year old gone
on birth control,
her 16 year old
thrown in a Boy’s Home
south of Memphis
for stripping butt naked
and flipping off
God on top of the county library,
the 3 men who’ve
beat her,
her 1 cup coffee
maker,
and the turkey
dinner
she’s packed in
her suitcase, all boxed up,
so the jackasses
won’t crush it.
We talk about
the stars
‘cause I don’t
get many where I come from,
and she teaches
me a song about bumblebees.
Waking up
alone’s the hard part,
we agree till
Nashville rises too soon,
sticking up
sore-thumb style on the horizon,
and a man
without flowers awaits my arrival.
Yesterday I
could almost love him,
could almost
hear him breathing,
but today, I’m
afraid,
my ass isn’t the
only thing gone numb
above the roar
of white walled, greyhound tires.
So we sit at the
Waffle House,
careful not to
touch for fear of nothing special—
coffee weak as
rainwater,
jukebox blaring Blue Christmas.
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