Feel like fallin’ in love with the first woman I meet,
Puttin’ her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street.
Bob Dylan
Go ahead, honey. Tip me back
like I was born to it, champagne in one hand,
my red skirt flaring off my kicked-up legs,
rumble me past the dress shop and the town clerk’s
to the alley of good deeds and sorry luck,
my steel stilettos sparking in a ray of street lamp,
ricocheting off the Camaro’s chrome,
glitzing up the alley long enough for you
to look into my face—
and if we won’t say love, if it’s only sex
among the take-out trays, emptied nips, crushed
joints, globby condoms at our feet,
over us a dim, kind, urgent cone of light, maybe
it’s enough at this late hour, in the moment given,
the heavy train shuddering up our legs, maybe it’s enough
for sex with sympathy for where we’ve been
and where we’re, helpless, going.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 3.
Throughout Carole A. Stasiowski’s many personal and professional life changes (she’s worked as a stitcher, trade publication editor, and healthcare marketer), poetry has remained the one, glorious constant. Poems have been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, Northeast Magazine, Zone 3 and other literary journals. While living in Connecticut, she was editor and poetry editor for The Connecticut Writer, helped to produce a series of poetry vignettes for Connecticut Public Television. She is grateful to live and work on Cape Cod.
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