Two Poems by Ginger Teppner

Eulogy for Virginia C.

In The Desert

My nose is the wrong shape

Of this I am very aware and barefoot

But my pant legs are wide and flowy

And the flower print makes me feel demure

Less salty

More crimson than flying

A Dog Barks

Chained to a metal stake

In the back yard, another back yard

With a traditional dog house and Lilac bushes

And a clothesline

All the less stained sheets

Hung to face the neighbor’s house

                        Snapping in a distant breeze

That carries

                        Away from ancient windows

Ancient mist or air

 I Want to Be a Bird

So I marry a pilot

And his nose in the wrong shape

And his words in the wrong color

But he laughs when I hold my cigarette

He appreciates my strong fingers

Like an aura to describe prophets face

How I bake the hard boiled eggs into the lasagna

How when he smashes the plate of spaghetti

Into the white washed kitchen wall

My first thought is that mashed potatoes

Make less of a racket

That Day

                       

                        You hummed and traced raindrops

Sucked backward in slow motion

Along the edge of the car window

Less Lonely

                        I was relieved when he left me.

It was a relief to be alone.

In early March I watched my disappointment

Walk out the side door. The door that opened to the garage

Do you remember this garage?

The smells of car

A red three wheeled trike

Metal rakes hanging in a row

You, a child with a kitten all smiles and pigtails

Criss-cross applesauce

                        Let’s go for a ride you say

                        In the big car you say

The neighbor boy pedals away

On his miniature green tractor

I Remember

                       

                        How she took my hand,

                        Not gently as if to say the world is harder

For a woman. Especially the handsome kind

The kind with stronger spine

Sometimes the efficiency of woman

Is to blame. Some women just don’t need

As much. And there is only so much

Pretending to be other than

                        Like when he runs down the dock

                        Pretending

                        To be attacked by a bee. Watch

As he runs clear off the end of the dock

There are so few real surprises

I suppose this was the hook

And they thought they were being cute

When they threw the blanket over our heads,

But I have the scars to prove

And the blanket smelled like outside rain,

And I never went back in the water after that

Already turning away. Weak with ankles

Prestolgia

My husband secures shade cloth to the top of the arbor.

I have been hounding him for weeks.

Tender shoots below need relief from the direct Florida sun.

He is using the utility rack on the back of his truck as a scaffold.

From my bedroom window I can only see his legs dressed in muck boots, the one’s I bought him for Christmas, and camo shorts.

This is his uniform.

His blue Guy Harvey t-shirt, the cap on his head, and his unshaven face are not in my field of vision.

I hear him singing to himself, talking out loud to his dog, rummaging in the tool box for something he can’t find.

I hear him climb off of the scaffold on to the ladder.

I hear him lose his balance, his quick recovery.

I hear his footsteps come around the East side of the house.

I hear him enter through the kitchen door.

From one room he says he is looking for scissors.

From another I tell him they are on the counter.

I imagine all of these movements and sounds and objects in my mind’s eye.

I name them all—translate them onto this page so that I can recognize them later.

But my truth is slanted.

Opinion inhabits every word—husband and arbor and tool and blue and kitchen and east.

Windows and trucks and shade lack neutrality.

Even as I write, this experience slips into the past.

I am filled with prestolgia—the knowledge that in the future I will long for an April moon.

But this is only an idea I can’t wake up from.



  
Ginger Teppner received her BA in Cultural Studies from Empire State College and her MFA in Creative Writing from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University. Recent publications include Upstairs at Duroc , Shambhala Times, Not enough Night, and Semicolon.