Poetry

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...

Little wiener dog doing his best show horse, 
jumping one, two, three stumps in a row;
his boy is too busy scrolling to notice, but I smile 
all the way up the hill. Bitter cold

What are words when they meet the action 
of what they attempt to modify?

I wonder. Yes, I’m looking up as I say this,
I wonder if I do have a superpower. Maybe
I have more than one aspect of attraction,
this knack for drawing others in close, almost
touching me.