Lynne Thompson
The New Eroticism
Because the 21st century has ditched
the old-school road to romance,
you have found a new way to seduce me.
Rather than stroke the honey-spot
where my neck succumbs
to a shoulder that could wonder you,
you stroke keys on some small black widget
held in your palm
until your want of me
glows green on the screen,
takes several minutes to reach me
with its ChiGong tune and then,
with no one near me knowing why,
causes my cheeks to redden.
Gone the parchment papers
with love sop writ in peacock blue.
Gone the 2 A.M. whispers
under cover of an inexhaustible dark,
only a telephone wire between us.
And because the time is now
and we can never go back
and because I want you
to inhale deeply, deeply, then whistle,
I press fingers to my own widget’s keys:
enter—enter—enter
Optimist’s Requiem
Foolish fool, foolproof fool, Queen of Foolhardy Fools, fool for the long foolish haul
who believes what a fool believes in. I’m on the path of tomfoolery and I just love
to trudge it. Mama didn’t raise no fool isn’t part of my lexicon and having a lexicon
is one reason I’m such a fool. I’ve been fooled fifty-nine times and never fooled
a single soul. I’ve been a fast car fool, a fool for fool’s gold, an American fool and
volunteered everywhere that needs one. Seems I’m not interested in anything else;
I think I want fool etched on my forehead. Was a time when being a fool was a slip
I could have slipped out of but that was forty slips ago. Now fool is tattooed on
my tattoos as I sit at the table eating beans and more beans—a farting fool, that’s me.
Don’t even think of desire or anything that might
turn you optimistic. It’s not going to happen. You’ll
forget how buttons button, get the cancer and die and
you’ll still be thinking maybe did you see that
did it look like love?
Bio
A Pushcart Prize nominee, Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. Thompson’s poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals Poetry International, Sou’Wester , Ploughshares and Poemeleon among others, as well as the 2010 anthology New Poets of the American West. To pay the bills, she works at UCLA as the Director of Employee & Labor Relations and serves on the Board of Directors of The HeArt Project, a non-profit that serves at-risk youth in Los Angeles County.