Cafe Solo

I loved you

with the scientific

excuse of the lonely.

Now I watch the streets

smog out of focus

or zoom in brutally

on the tragically beautiful.

My eyes have met no one's

all morning. I have forgotten

the purr of my name.

I remember only the brush

of my cat's teeth

when she tells me

she loves me. For weeks

the only lesson I've learned

is that the leaves of the apple

are finally turning. Everything

has let go. There are days now

that go by without a sound.

I could be anyone.

Once I was a person

who loved you.

Beetles

A man who once loved me, told me

I knew nothing of beauty.

He had loved a double

more beautiful than I.

I'm hexed by a girl of pale heart,

a dove who wouldn't circle in day.

The thighs of her jeans are speckled with mustard.

Her hands are in her pockets too much of the time;

if they left, they would be birds, fragile, humming.

They are right where she puts them.

She's a farmer, plowing

the gray dirt.

She loves the land, its

ugliness.

I'm an ugly woman, weedlike,

elbowing my way through the perfect

grass. The best of what I am 

is in the gravel behind the train yard

where obsidian chips lodge

in the rocks like beetles.
I burrow and glow.

Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada