Poetry by
Nancy Devine

Young blonde drops her mule, wages her foot over
it two times, run her big toe up his pant
leg as if it were a harp string while her
face rests. He lets go of his pen, just can’t

hang on to a phrase he’d begun to court.
Her arch fits his knee like a yellow cap,
the whole of her intentions its import
as her other shoe-less foot starts its tap,

tapping up his other leg, one more string
she wanted to play with her soft sole.
What he’s written starts to whirl, its spinning
loud as earth’s path around the sun. Whole

passages of him turn, commence a slow melt.
Balanced like this-the best he’s ever felt.

                   Waiting

Tossed tanned legs from the bed and
my body followed—a fling?—
Toes crushed red carpet—shag?—
WAITING
                Scrubbed the teeth,
yanked a brush in the brunette stuff,
deodorant, still WAITING.
                                               Bee-bopped off for work,
hmm… green grass…
anyhow doing me for a while,
WAITING mostly.
                              All done so gandered into the tube,
Old Ozzie and Harriet on,
marched around the block in fragrant designer indigos
always WAITING.
                              Blew breeze avec ma mere,
bought a purse, chewed Wrigley’s,
still WAITING.
                        Have been to a “U,”
read some things, 3.97, played
Thematic Apperception Test with clouds,
WAITING.
                 Wrote a letter and such others.

Tell me, Mr. Francis Ford Coppola
was your Apocalypse Now enough
or are you still WAITING, too?

After love’s kip of the hips
lying in a murky tide pool where longing and desire,
like some spark of RNA from a distant planet, make life
waves of the body wave of breath
contracting ecstasy heartbeats.

Homo sapiens we are how fingers touch and glide in
how mouths kiss and swallow
how sense leaves us to linger in the best of ourselves
the small water that we are.

When the legs settle and the eyes open
and the hand that lay across the forehead like a fever
as well as the cool compress to quell that fever…
We can stand up to do our work
Seas’ shadows in us as though we might become
another moon.

Culinary School

To him,
she was a pudding cup in a number two
recyclable container
from a pack of 12
inchoate chocolate suspended
in pleasing petroleum products
to blame for
not coming with her own spoon.

It was tira misu summer
Ladyfingers her thighs
sopping up his not-so-simply syrup
with coffee
mascarpone cheese
his pick-me up line:
Sweetie.

Losing Winter

Snow melts; its breadth contracts into piles,
dirty, striated with mud.
Puddles freeze over at night
crack where you step
like a windshield hit by a road pebble
the next morning.

Spring is a fitful friend.
You can find yourself lonely
even when you stand next to her.

And April is a hard, hard place to fall asleep.