-ViZual Contrast at Bar-

EVENTS 2003
a Poetic Memoir
by Jessica DePue

Greg he writes letters with his birthday pen
Sometimes he's aware that they're drawing him in
-Tori Amos,"Pretty Good Year"

Mamaw signed out permanently
Etching her name in stone
Straight north I moved
To a modern Atlantis
Multiplying whims
Love tracked me
Expired me
Dodging its momentum
Moved with him
Duplicating the Fool

My father's ghost flew in
An apparition
From a dream before the phone
Divulged his distant death
I locked the bathroom door
Bled tears replacing tile
With my salty foundations
No sun could penetrate
This lucid skin

That guy's gaul
Jumped the fence on my grief
Suggested I "Take a jog, shake it off"
Rubbed my absence every wrong way
Revealing more of nothing
Hatred bred black hearts that spring
Clung in my chest heaving
Resentment in spades
Inhaling discontentment
Drinking everything
Cutting lines disgracefully
Through my head

Omens in the water
Someone's loose screw
Set a poison to my cats-
Let them die without me
Three autumns past
I lie still unnerved
My pre-dawn hours probed in bed
For answers that question themselves

I met nicer people
The manager of my local bar
Drove a mean truck
One dry day saddled up, suggested a tall
Cool one, took me for milkshakes
Completely distracted my lactose
Intolerance with intricate mobiles
Swinging from his ceiling
Influx between
Visual elations

He fell into the four letter gap
With black hair, biker flair
Moved with her
To some vapid vortex
While the mean one sends parcels
Creeps them in
Persuading discomfort
My unlikely position views
Beauty again
Beauty begins
Her absurd whims goose me
Into stitches
On the sly

I hiked to Coit Tower
Absorbed Pacific's blue avalanche
Pooled between Golden Gate and Bay Bridges
Repaid visits to Mark Strand
And Pablo Neruda, red books in grey fog
Downed hot dogs and root beer
Steared clear of tourists
Wore socks with sailboats
Afloat my feet, recaptured
Sunday's slanted breeze
Warm and bouyed
In Jeffry's yacht

Parrot cries descended with leaves from those trees
I may have cried with them displaced in those trees