Poetry

Like a flock of dispossessed 
in a city of converts, we found our way 
to the Shamrock where the bikers 
congregated to play pool. 

What happened to the city that made us 
promises, promises we had the luxury 
to believe or not?
Night caved its streets, 

Why I thought I needed to rent a third-floor attic.
Why I thought one mattress on the floor, a desk, a vanity

Lighted room. Man and Woman enter talking.

—I mean, we built the world.

—What do you mean?

If we were to go
           if the house fell in an earthquake

if fire, if fire

& in the mornings sometimes awoke so cold
—the wind in Iowa City was brutal—
those days of doubt, those days of troubled land,
that I did not want to get out of bed &

In Iowa City, the restaurant 
where I worked on the weekend, 
I befriended another waitress, blond & blue-eyed, 

I was washing dishes in the sink. 
My hands were wet. The baby was crying. 

My mother, teaching me how to protect my body: 
“When a man touches you here, yell I am a body
that will bear a child.” How was I,
a child, to understand that as the sanctity
of my body. How was I to know to say, 
the body without that potential...