NOT YOUR BITCH–The Poetry Series #5

FEATURING

MK CHAVEZ

Autobiography # 4 (Temporalis)

I guarded the museum in Kentfield, watching
over the art of the man-made bag lady, her face

emerging from a recycled brown paper
that could have carried a nine-year old’s lunch,

and the sculptural bliss of a pig, his body formed
from uneaten pork rinds, the pig glowed. That’s when

I saw you enter the room pushing like an old man,
edging along the red brick for safety, then came

the vision of modernity, smooth corners, the lines
of a home linear and well behaved, your watercolor

smile in the Tamalpais sunlight looked like orange juice
in a clear glass. Imaged us innocent and beaming

at the shiny toaster, and everything around us
round and yellow, but the chill of the blue and white

terra cotta tile pressed an image into a frame in my
mind. The clunky machine, a dishwasher, helpless,

open mouthed, everyone sticking something dirty
into her everyday, imagined what it might be like

to take it, over and over again, and I ran.

*   *   *

MK Chavez writes about the beauty that can be found in ugliness. She is co-host of Acker’s Dangerous Daughters, a San Francisco reading series of Cherry Bleeds Literary Journal. Chavez has three chapbooks Virgin Eyes, (Zeitgeist Press) and Visitation, and Next Exit #9 with john sweet (Kendra Special Editions.) You can find out about her up coming publications at www.littlebrownsparrow.com