Maybe You Recall
Maybe you don’t recall
How sometimes honey’s smell
Can assail in a way that
Dupes the nose and reads like ripe feet.
The equivalent of the mind getting into
A Ford Focus after soccer practice
And, in a daze, recognizing that it
Doesn’t recognize the strange mother
Behind the wheel.
Poems that rhyme, a poet who I once kissed said, are corny.
The MacBook I had as a teen had tinny speakers.
Limp under the lion’s roar of my shower’s stream
I couldn’t make out the nuance of Springsteen.
Never was I able to make out nuance.
But hearing “Prove it all Night” on the radio
Now I understand what it is he is proving.
My feet smell because my slippers smell
because my feet smelled.
On occasion, the past is like a bear trap.
You are like the bear swiping at salmon
With a monster of springs and steel lodged
Onto your furry flesh.
I swapped stories with someone online and it felt
illicit; Bloom’s billet-doux.
We both wrote protagonists named Rachel.
The name’s popularity reached its peak in 1996,
Coming in at ninth most common. It’s good