By: Ann Pedone
I’ve stopped pretending that I am ok with the
Way things are
I’m tired of always saying please and
Thank you
I want to skip the parent teacher
Conference I know that the dog needs water
You already told me
That I need to check the mail
I am fully aware that my hips crack
Occasionally and my neck didn’t look
Like this a year ago and yes, the skin around my
Ankles has started to sag I want to
Forget to buy toilet paper I don’t care if the oil needs to be changed
I want to hike up my skirt and lay in the sun until my thighs
Burn I want to
Put my fingers in your mouth and feel you
Suck them
I want to let the car run out of gas
I don’t want to pay the water bill I’m going to
Rip up the map
I’m going to go a week without milk in the house
I want to feel the moon fall into my hands
I want to pull the petals off of this rose and eat them
Don’t tell me that age is just a number
Don’t tell me I have to wait to cross the street
Don’t tell me there’s always tomorrow
Lay with me here
Lay with me here in this bed and let me wrap my
Legs around you and I will
Feel the sky
Move
Through me
Yellow to
Gray
To blue
Love is not consolation, wrote Simone Weil
Love is
Light
The business of these words keeps
Me awake at night makes me
Want to tear down these walls and return
To something warm and
Blue
Something like the sea maybe
The Mediterranean
I want my life to be simple and yet all
Night I am putting away poems in boxes storing
Them for you to read I want you
To take them out and
Read them somewhere in the sun
Under a different kind of light but
I know
I know sometimes you think my face is too pretty for these
Pieces of me
These pieces I want to pick them up and carry
Them in my skirts across the field to give to you
So you can see that there is still
Some moonlight
Here between my legs can you see it
You will never be
Mine
My valentine, my sky will only darken your hands I am
Building a bower here in my body a place where you can
Rest your head we sometimes don’t get to
Choose whom we love but I
Want to keep the water you have poured into me
Ann Pedone graduated from Bard College with a degree in English Literature and has a Master’s Degree in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. Ann is the author of the chapbooks The Bird Happened (Leave Books), perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho. (Cup and Dagger Press) as well as the forthcoming DREAM/WORK and Everywhere You Put Your Mouth (Halas Press.) Her work has recently appeared in multiple journals including Riggwelter, Big City Lit, Contemporary Verse 2, The Phare, West Trade Review, The Open Page Literary Journal, Slipstream, Rogue Agent, The French Literary Review, SAND, and The Shore.