A poem by poet Barbara Crooker:
near the peanut butter. He calls me ma’am, like the sweet
southern mother’s boy he was. This is the young Elvis,
slim-hipped, dressed in leather, black hair swirled
like a duck’s backside. I’m in the middle of my life,
the start of the body’s cruel betrayals, the skin beginning
to break in lines and creases, the thickening midline.
I feel my temperature rising, as a hot flash washes over,
the thermostat broken down. The first time I heard Elvis
on the radio, I was poised between girlhood and what comes next.
My parents were appalled, in the Eisenhower fifties, by rock
and roll and all it stood for, let me only buy one record,
“Love Me Tender,” and I did.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I have on a tight orlon sweater, circle skirt,
eight layers of rolled-up net petticoats, all bound
together by a woven straw cinch belt. Now I’ve come
full circle, hate the music my daughter loves, Nine
Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Crash Test Dummies.
Elvis looks embarrassed for me. His soft full lips
are like moon pies, his eyelids half-mast, pulled
down bedroom shades. He mumbles, “Treat me nice.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Now, poised between menopause and what comes next, the last
dance, I find myself in tears by the toilet paper rolls,
hearing “Unchained Melody” on the sound system. “That’s all
right now, Mama,” Elvis says, “Anyway you do is fine.” The bass
line thumps and grinds, the honky tonk piano moves like an ivory
river, full of swampy delta blues. And Elvis’s voice wails above
it all, the purr and growl, the snarl and twang, above the chains
of flesh and time.
Karamu
Barbara Crooker’s poems have appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, Poet Lore, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, Nimrod and anthologies such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Her awards include the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, fifteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a residency at the Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France; and a residency at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland.
Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press 2010), and Gold (Cascade Books, 2013). Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), and by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, and she’s read in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress.
Barbara’s latest book is Gold, a collection of poems about losing her mother. Look for one of the poems and a giveaway on Friend for the Ride next month!
To learn more about Barbara and her work, visit her website at http://www.barbaracrooker.com/
Friend For The Ride 