Close Sleeping | Michelle McEwen

First published on UmbrellaJournal.com, 2008

Close Sleeping

But if we sleep this close, tangled in our Friday night lavender
sheets, our cold ashy feet will meet
and I will have to turn over on my back, split my stick-legs
like scissors.
But if we sleep this close, the sharp bones of our ankles
will rub together the way two pennies do when you have it—
reminding me of that afternoon
when we first met
at that bank on Wintonbury Avenue—cashing in
our pennies, our we-need-bread-&-eggs-&-milk pennies. But
if we sleep this close, that Murray’s Superior Hair Dressing Pomade
will push full into the cool blacks of my nostrils
and it will get me to thinking back to our wedding day
and how my two-year-old black dress from Nadine’s Dress Shoppe
and your wrinkled suit from Sage Allen’s didn’t matter
and how that Pomade, all caked in your hair, made it wavy overnight
and how my belly poked loudly through
my 99 cent nylons,
my dress.
And the heavier my breasts became and the rounder my belly got
the more your “you-know-I-care-’bout-you-Sarah-Nell” kind of love
grew.
In that beer stained booth, in the cramped corner
of Maybelle’s Restaurant, by the broke jukebox
was our reception—
just us two, a large cheese pizza, onion rings, cheesecake
New York style, and a gang of Italian men,
from Boston, packed like roaches in the booth behind us
cutting off their R’s. But
if we sleep this close, my fingers will creep up
your back until you move, curl up
like our baby boy; this is when I will pull
my fingers quickly away,
let you think it is a corner of sheet;
a fly.
But if we sleep this close, tangled in our Saturday morning lavender
sheets, my big toe will linger
too long against the soles of your feet
and I may have to
unlearn what grandma taught and climb on top—
taking,
snatching,
stealing
my sugar.

The Girls on Josephine Street | Melissa McEwen

First published in Rattle #31 Summer 2009 (Tribute to African American Poets)

The Girls on Josephine Street

Josephine Street is notorious.
Everybody says it’s the street
where the fast girls hang,
so when the bus driver yells
“Josephine Street,” everybody waits
to see who gets off and almost
always it’s the loud mouth girls
in the way back. The quiet fast ones
get off on the next block and walk
back.

I stared at them in wonder
whenever my father drove down
Josephine Street to get to Mr. Pizza.
My mother would say, “Why can’t you just go
and get pizza from somewhere ‘round here?”
“Those places got nothing
on Mr. Pizza,” said my father.
So we’d drive down and through Josephine
Street, just for pizza. I’d be in
the back seat (my legs tucked beneath me)
looking out, imagining
those high school girls slipping

out of windows, struggling

out of jeans, sliding beneath boys. I wanted
to wiggle my way out of jeans, wiggle
my way beneath dancing boys with gold
teeth and minds filled with bad boy schemes. Hungry

for freedom, I wanted to taste, smack my lips
on the fruits of independence. I wanted to be fast like
the Spanos sisters riding their 10-speeds down
Josephine Street, hair flying behind them,
their shorts so short,
their sentences filled with street slang
and names of boys.

Sucker | Michelle McEwen

First published in O & S, April 2009

Sucker

Gwendolyn Lee was the first Coffeyville girl

to pay daddy any real attention.  Any weekend

you could find them on some corner downtown—

holding hands.  The Thomasville boys, his bunch,

made fun of him for this.  Real Coffeyville girls didn't

hold hands— they started at the good stuff.  No one

ever really intended to make a Coffeyville girl

their main girl— except maybe Coffeyville boys

who were no match for the boys of Thomasville.  Even

on the football field, the Thomasville boys

outshined them and their girls took notice— would do

anything to be able to jump down from the bleachers,

lean against the fence and holler out the name

of a Thomasville athlete, but

they'd never be a main girl— they'd get taken

to the prom, they'd get shoved in the river and

not complain, but they'd never be able to say they made it

out of Coffeyville on account of a Thomasville

boy.  Daddy says he was the first

in Thomasville to fall hard for a Coffeyville girl.  Sucker,

they called him, but he didn't mind because

to him Gwendolyn Lee was just the sort you hung on to— maybe

married.  What did he want, he said, with a girl

whose mind was always on crossed legs

& Sundays?  Those were Thomasville girls for you

and Thomasville girls did not impress him— they were

made, instead, to impress mothers and fathers and aunts.  Gwendolyn Lee,

he said, didn't care how she looked eating a peach.

Yvette Wuz Here | Melissa McEwen

First published in Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta!, 2007

Yvette Wuz Here

 

On bathroom walls and doors of stalls: Yvette Wuz Here.

She is everywhere. On inside covers of high school textbooks

 

her whole name blue ink penned and flirty in the roundest cursive,

the Os in her last name like the loopty-loop ride at Riverside.

 

You can tell she was all cotton candy pink lipstick and fingernail polish.

No doubt she was cute. The wooden bleachers out behind the school

 

showcase her prophecies—Together Forever and For Always.

The backs of school chairs are scarred with her Yvette Plus and

 

Yvette Loves. She affixed her name to guys dubbed Tiny and Fuzz

and Country and Red who must've fought over her in school hallways,

 

pummeled their fists into faces, getting themselves expelled, missing

the prom—and the myth of that night—with Yvette, the girl who got down

 

under cafeteria tables to autograph the underside, bet that's where

she'd hide, during lunchtime, from lovers who skipped class to find her, to cross-

 

examine her, ask "Where were you on the day of…?" and "With who?" But her

alibi is all over the place, written in marker or ink pen or etched in wood: Yvette Wuz Here.

Jason's Haitian-Creole Lesson | Michelle McEwen

First published in The Caribbean Writer, 2009

Jason's Haitian-Creole Lesson

Coucoune—

you taught me that word,

said it with lips pouted

and pink: shoon-shoon.

You grew up with this word,

preferred it to the American

equivalent which was, to you,

too harsh and hard

on the ears— with its p, u,

double esses, and y.

You could only spell it—

refused to say it.  Said my word

did nothing at all for the

mouth.  Take coucoune—

a blossoming

of lips.

A bursting!

A ripening!

And I agreed— for upon hearing

your word for the first time,

I took it for a fruit

and this made you smile.

_____'s Girl | Melissa McEwen

First published in Mipo: a Community Chapbook, 2009


_____'s Girl

In Junior High School, I wanted

to be owned

by a possessive

noun, owned by a noun—proper,

the correct way: a hickey

on the face so the whole school could see

that you were his baby, like a wedding ring, like a tattoo

of his name on your left breast, like having

his baby and giving it his last name

or whole name if it were a boy, like

the girl who had all of the above

by the time she finished high school. I

remember in chemistry class

how the hickey on her cheek shined

under the classroom's light

like she was stung or bitten and we

all knew who did it. I couldn't look

away, wanted to possess it, peel it off

and stick it on me, study it

at home in front of the mirror

in the bathroom with the lamp

with no shade.

Sarah Nell White Goes Home | Melissa McEwen

First published in The Litchfield Review, 2007

Sarah Nell White Goes Home

Tomorrow she goes

back to her town – the town
where she lived as a White.
She hasn’t been back in so long,
she has forgotten the names
of roads. Maybe it will come back
to her the second she stands
in the kitchen of her childhood.
She will fall back – easy -
into her native dialect like she
never left. Sometimes, here, in the place
where she lives now as a woman,
no longer a White, she slips up,
says things that are foreign
to her children. But there, in her town,
everyone will get what she means
when she says, “eem.” Her old ways
will rise up, take over, and dominate
when she sits down at the kitchen table.
She will be a White, again, and the
ring on her finger will be just a ring
she won at a fair and not the wedding
ring that cut off her circulation
and her original name. Carried away
by this freedom, she will walk
out the door and all over her town
not like an outsider asking where is,
but like she never split, knowing
the way to go – ruled by her feet
because the muscles in her legs
did not forget.

Blood | Michelle McEwen

First published in Best New Poets, 2007

Blood

There is always a leader amongst them—

the girl-cousins.  She is the one who is allowed

to sit at the table with the aunts-mothers-wives—

trusted with the big knife when it comes time

to slice the watermelon. She is the one

who bleeds first.  The one the aunts talk

about in smile-heavy whispers: they say

she will be knocked-up before she knows it,

before that chapter is even gotten ‘round

to in health class.  It is she who makes

her boy-cousins wish blood wasn’t as thick

as all that.

In vacation photos, she smiles the hardest—

hands on hips, head to one side, hair hanging;

hickies trophy-shiny in the sun. She is the one

who makes out with the local kid before

the trip ends. And when she promises to keep

in touch, you can almost see the bolding-&-italicizing

of her "I will"s and “I swear”s.

The aunts try not to smile when they say

that girl is going to mess around and get

killed by some man one of these days. She is

the one who notices, first, the fresh blood

staining your bikini bottom. Taking you by the hand,

she drags you out from the water, leads you

to the ladies' room as though you are not the same

age as her, as though she is already somebody's

mother.