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.
I burrow and glow.
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada
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