mary june brown

DINNER IN AUTUMN
*This piece was purchased and has been published elsewhere, however I retain the rights.

A work bell pushed a peal and she

She ran fourteen blocks onward home

Home where they agreed to meet

Meat and candied beets, repast’s entity

Hurried home where she longed for him

Long foreign doorbell hummed at eight-oh-ten

(ate meat and candied beets)

He came nodding with his sly fox style

Smile, but do not touch her amber hair

Her hair not done and those are hot rollers

Hot, rolled her onto the stair

A wolf feasted on meat and candied beets

Eight weeks later he took his leave

Leaves and grass and hands gather round

Rounded belly thrum and beats

Beets, sugared, and warm meet

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Lament for a Recorded Affair
*This piece was purchased and has been published elsewhere, however I retain the rights.

For you it was one lifetime about such lifetimes
You were motivated by what people term “soul mates”
Something you didn’t have with Joanna, but then
It’s rare, this connection, you went on and
Your new young lady horded it in the moment
Payment tossed to her by means of a line

She laced a little book to record these matters
An advisor inside told her that lifetimes expire quickly
Rotton-sweet words and body motion sink into memory
The book filled up inkwise, and when she closed it
You had gone elsewhere to think and so never called

It’s been near a decade and she recalls
Little snatches of the cloak-and-dagger meetings
Naturally your hair had foxy grey character then
(Twenty years old and she thought it charming)
But you loved your good reputation and so would never leave

Let me into your reputation, she plead, but you wanted
Darkness and legs moving and a mouth anew meeting yours
She gave her mouth and legs and what dark places she had
After this you went home to Joanna and read, forgetting

Well, there was the diary but she lost track of it
We figured it all got recorded in her bones

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