Roxanne BanksMalia lives in Denver and is pursuing her MFA through Lesley University’s Low Residency program. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, and her freelance work in the YourHub section of The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.---------
What My Poem Would Tell You (If You Ever Read It)
I love you as much as a cat rabbit-
punches a cat nip cigar, locked
in embrace under the table,
for under our table is a den,
dark and sturdy as a blanket fort,
the cat nip sticky and fresh,
and his claw is freed of its curve
if only ephemerally,
in faux fur. For us, I would give
my spleen, in all its stoic eggplant-
ness, though you don’t like nightshades.
Sorry! I seek you as a moth
flies to flame; I am more certain
than a train that bellows each night
at our window, knocks blinds, rattles
locks, so lusty, so cantankerous,
so, so that moth in the zapper
last summer in Limon
or West Kansas. I call you
Butterball, when I know
you deserve Dean or Rex or Old Blue.
But your feet are Thanksgiving
(though gamey as ganders).
I’d crawl on the roof to watch
you come in, steady and steely
as Midwestern tornadoes.
Baby, hush. No snoring. Thanks.
You were Roosevelt to my Churchill,
my Marshall Plan, when you stood up
to Omar, the Mexican time-share
salesman, who said we don’t deserve
bacation. Our honeymoon.
I’ll never be your pizza burning,
my worms that surface sidewalks post rain,
your spiders that haunt, crawl through tub drain.
I’d teach you Poetry in prison.