by Mindi Kirchner
All the women at the white trash church festival
swerve strollers like bumper cars.
Too much Rolling Rock,
everything zooming and electric,
rides like giant Tinker-toys trapped in wind tunnels
and bound by the stuff of school art projects,
glitter, glue sticks, duct tape on the safety bars
wet with sick-kid snot.
Sight as shameful as three-months-along
Ray Ann, who’ll go from talk
to whisper and hush of the town
after tonight, after those K-Mart gold hoops
lasso Mr. Most Married,
Mr. Least Likely To Woo Her
winning a ring toss.
Surprise! A cheap cotton bear stuffed with nothing.
No, she’s heavier with lust than that, and because lust is just
love-less-evolved—
monkey with a breast in his mouth
instead of a yummy banana—
up they go in the ferris wheel’s
rickety squirrel cage of death.
Up, up and coming away,
saying whatever name
rolls from caramel apple tongues.
So sweet, this windswept night, even the trees
tease the cloud-tendrils with eroticism,
and the silver slant of moon could only be God
winking approval at groaning and grunting
and coming,
their faces indistinguishable from sky,
with the rest of the world, rightfully,
and right where they’ve always been:
beneath them.
Mindi Kirchner-Greenway was born in Lancaster, PA. She moved to Youngstown, Ohio in 2004 on a whim and a Bruce Springsteen song. She has a chapbook of poetry, “Song of the Rest of Us,” published by Kent State University Press, and has published poems in Eclipse, Perigee, The Wick Poetry Series Anthology, and other journals. Other than writing, she enjoys teaching, running, Phillies baseball, good music, game shows, and binge-sleeping. She lives on the Northside of Youngstown with her smelly dog, Tank Greenway, and her slightly-less-smelly husband, William Greenway.