submitted by Kimberly Yarbrough Carpenter, Monroe, LA

Wake up little one
If you don’t come
Then I’ll take the baby.

Be quiet, lie still
Papa has work for you
The nighttime is when I pick

The freshest of fruit

Busted cherries bleed red
Stains the teeth
Stains the sheets

Block the ringing pain
It’s Thanksgiving again
The turkey’s huge

Dessert is you.

DREAMING TOSHI

On a train from Springfield to New York,
she drank tequila with an old man
that mirrored her first love.
He raised the bottle and winked across the aisle.
His charm seduced her to his side.
They drank from mountains high, to desert low
and through other wild places.
Through the agave, amber mist
she heard of a man long unknown.
Eighteen years come and gone,
Without him she would grow.

Her mother, a sleeping beauty upon a scandalous bed of secrets.
Tonight, she walks beneath a canopy of crushed diamond lights,
atop a train trestle with owl whistling dream songs written for the mind.
Singing all revealed in time.

Lick my skin to attention.
Tell the tale.
Open the windows wide.
Put the truth on sale.
Fling open the shades.
Pull the heavy blankets off the bed.
Only the coolest, clean sheets can touch me now.
Bottom and top – these are my twin lovers.

Surrender your mind to the worm.
Kiss those things that make you squirm.
Piss in arched, mezcalian streams in the valley
where his mouth empties:
Your daddy is dead
And your mama’s mind was left unattended.
The tale’s been told, now baby’s alone.

She fixes her stare at something in the distance.
He whispers, “Gal, give a 42 year old vet a chance.”
She figures, a day of service is all it is,
one devoid of romance.
Puckered lips go down
down and around the mountain
no longer wondering who will answer
her holler in the pleated pages of the night.
A last minute bit of business for God and everybody to witness.
Not unlike when she was three, the night she lost her virginity
under the bowels of Fun Town on the Southside of Chi Town.

These two pieces I wrote for myself and my sister.