Shamrock Motel, Route 17, Outside Corning, New York

You agreed to meet Tuesday
for a lark, ever the wavering
vamp vying for her wanderlust
sharpshooter, tough-guy blue.
Predictable as blaze, you were certain
this time you would conquer
his misbehaving heart,
scale inconstancy’s cloud.
One more corner room—
silty with lust, the mattress
molding and sumped, light years
of love notes fallen flat.
It never works like that.
You, tailed by a slagheap.
His trysting rules in media res,
glacial pebbles a nibble at the pane.
How many years
and you still don’t get
why the window could not break.
You swallowed your tongue,
complicit poet of the gimcrack
walls. Yet another afternoon brewed
hot then cold then hot, molten
blown to glass, mere miles
down that road. Swaying
to the lyric, crystal sips
from a Cole Porter tune.
Swinging its inevitable
fists of ruin.

Their Cheating Hearts

All that’s left in the living room is a rug made in Turkey,
the wool diagrammed from vegetable and root.

She sits by the fireplace, waiting for an omen
in a smoldering wedge of wood.
Hoping for Mary who’ll remind her—
it was only about dancing seams
down a leather skirt
and a poetry that urged,
Pick me.

She scraped plates and scrubbed,
contraband dawns and the smell of Dawn,
those honey-glazed, log-cabin nights.
After their late-late meals
of garden zucchini, potatoes,
and the most royal of Silver Queens.

Now she pours a kettle
over the grounds, slow drip
into a mug that celebrates
the ambidextrous,
above and below the belt.

He’s in the doorway, shirtless,
pointing out a shred of nest
beyond their heads.
She is supposed to be
swimming laps at the Y
then overnight at a friend’s.
They are packing,
his music, his books,
folding his quilt,
each with two corners,
walking to meet.

One last night
to sail their adulterous seas.

In the morning,
he’ll screw hose,
start the siphon
down from the loft
to deflate their watery bed.

Where she was his starlet,
harlot, the frolicking (but married) girl
he begged to talk bawdy-blues dirty,
hurry up and put that dog between my legs
barely the half of it,
slap of skin, snap of shutter,
the salt on an ear of corn,
his addictive sweat.

After he’s gone?
She’ll claw the piney planks.
Supplicant for splinter,
far too willing to trade the wreckage
for that first song,
Irma Thomas on his stereo—you can have
my husband but please don’t mess with my man-—
and the solstice floor grown cold
so they adjourned, seconds on the stairs,
their two-timing turned two-step
marathon in a roadhouse honky-tonk.

Not unlike the Crooked Board Saloon
where he once took her to strut her stuff.
Watched from a stool while she fooled
with a guy down the bar. Watched them
heading out back. Waited inside the door.
Watched as she stretched long down the picnic
table’s bench. Waited for her to catch his eye.
Watched for her knees, opening wide.
Waited for her to lose her open-toed shoes.
Watched.

Author Biography

Nancy Flynn grew up on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, spent many years on a creek in Ithaca, New York, and now lives near the mighty Columbia in Portland, Oregon. Recent poems have appeared in Blood Orange Review, PANK, qarrtsiluni, and Sugar Mule; her second poetry chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, will be published in November 2012. More at www.nancyflynn.com.

Once upon a time, my nemesis was the cockroach,
that summer I worked at the Indian import shop in Brattle Square.
Their squadrons aligned for daily battle over the barricades:
drying dishes next to the apartment kitchen sink.
Whenever I got up in the night, turned on the light,
how they’d scatter, their claws a skin-skimming whisper
married to hiss. I tried every variation of the “Vegas roach trap”—
stale beer, coffee grounds, sticks up the sides of a Mason jar
and Vaseline around the lip to increase the slick.
All hail, the cockroach, apotheosis of tenacity!

It was the roaches in their 4th of July parade
across my futon, the final straw that finally
drove me into Ted’s bed (and arms)
even though we weren’t that kind
of roommates—one more who was gay not bi.
This was, after all, 1974: the U.S. still in Vietnam,
the Dead on their first tour without Pigpen,
and Bowie at the Music Hall in Boston where he donned
a Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit for half the evening’s songs.

My enemy should have been tanning
so to protect this Irish-mottled skin.
Or Camel straights because of my (future) asthma lungs.
Or bare feet on the hot tar, bottle-shard Massachusetts Avenue.
Or the guy who grabbed my crotch under my hippie skirt
that eve walking home from King of Hearts
at the cinema on Central Square.

Those days of rush and foolish trust,
any stranger might be christened “friend.”
A guy’d walk into a store, blond hair a waterfall
over his Pendleton plaid. Back-and-forth sallies
about what you’re reading (Anaïs Nin), the decline
of literacy (shameful), whether Mr. “Enemies List” Nixon
will really be impeached. Then, cosmic coincidence,
you’re both Tassajara Bread Book devotees!
The next night, you’re on the Red Line to Alewife,
a dinner of lentil loaf, alfalfa sprouts, and Something Missing
muffins. Followed by lips locked over a rickety
kitchen table then the (requisite) screwing on the linoleum floor.
After? Midnight’s T back to the Buddha
who, by the way, is not in favor of lust.

Who teaches to love, accept, live and let every enemy live,
cockroaches and all. I’m not sure I ever got to that,
that August when I watched the swans in the Public Garden
and walked walked walked those city streets, restless
to escape my awkward infestation-situation,
notebook in a messenger bag, my temporary
enemy an inkless fountain pen.

_________

Ligature
(on the theme Enough Rope)

Tie Me Down, Tie Me Up

Strips of rag, one nubby wool, one silk,
we re-arrange our cast-offs, braided, taut.
Down to what’s underneath we merge—
your strapless bustier, my Gucci jock.
Touch is our glove, our tether,
& our truss—the ties that lash,
that fret us to the bed. Oh,
lift your legs & let them wrap around
my clarinet,
my woody reed,
my head!

Licorice Stick

Jimmy Dorsey tootled “Green Eyes,”
with—oh, the power to send me ogling

your rings of amber, my cautionary hepcat.
Hell, even Ol’ Blue Eyes wanted to fly us

to the moon. Why didn’t we take him up on that?
Go go-go before Bechet blew jail, his clarinet

emptied of the gone-away blues while we two
dueled, all our wrong chords snorted out.

Likely, the reed was simply slipping,
needed a new ligature, thread or hemp.

Ampersand

Our typeset was a unit.
Two graphemes make a glyph
& letter shapes depend on circumstance.
The Latin et for “and” signs & in Trebuchet.
And per se and (ampersand):
& by itself is and.
And me myself?
I start, you stop,
I finish sentences. Fee! Fie!
Foe! Fum! Why won’t you let me
fl-fl-float, slurred ligature,
disfigured cuneiform?

And What About the Necktie?

He went crazy for the ties,
that winter of detox,
rehab, the county
psychiatric ward.

Every pattern,
every hue to match
the expensive suits
tailored to fit.

Blame it on the manic—
he must have draped
one hundred
by the end.

When his landlord walked
the rooms with me
an empty rack,
all that was left.

Where Mandrakes Grow

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow.
That’s why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!

—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Pressure on the cerebullum from the noose.
Forensically, postmortem priapism is an indicator—
death was likely swift and violent.

Lynch me, hog-tie, jute my carotid,
cinch it closed. All I wanted was
to merge—the font, the fount, the godhead.

Angel lust.

Suicide Vaudeville

Way out on Sapsucker Road,
a sidewalk to shovel and snowdrift
steps to reach the song & dance.
Rifle behind the door,
a wineglass shattered on the stairs.
Daisy-chained neckties lassoed to beams
in the living room where the radio
belted the “Best of Broadway,”
Ethel Merman and Everything’s coming
up roses, her mezzo soprano clobbering
every tenor within reach.
Better Gypsy than Sweeney Todd,
the ambulance driver said. Meat pies
and a trail of blood would have been—
let’s face it, a little too burlesque.

The Final Inamorata

That tightening loop,
a failed
meridian.

Un-
blessed the bruising ties.

They bind.
They rend.

Author Biography

Born in the coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, Nancy Flynn’s writing has received a James Jones First Novel Fellowship and an Oregon Literary Fellowship; her second chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, will be published by Burning River in 2012. A former university administrator, she now lives in Portland, Oregon. In 2004, she happily reclaimed www.nancyflynn.com from the realtor in Massachusetts who had it first.