There are narratives stashed in the basement
inside the pockets of a gray wool coat
that kept me warm my first year
teaching in Korea's bitter winter of '94.

There are plagiarized rhymes
in a box on the closet shelf,
old letters from a first love
who wooed me with Loverboy lyrics
he claimed for his own

My name is engraved in a golden sonnet
once clasped around my wrist by the one
I thought I would marry. It keeps quiet
in the night stand drawer.

A recipe poem for the wildest
rum cake you'll ever taste
spins in Grandma's electric mixer
which I still use, even though it's cracked
and runs with only one beater.

Gossip is detailed in a rant poem (in desperate
need of revision) within the tin tray Coke Girl
who smiles and caters to guests.

An epic has started in the portrait
of the perfect alien family, complete
with planets, drawn with colored pencils
by a young artist whose brother cannot
speak, whose father moved out.

Lined up in the medicine cabinet,
the poems that sting and suffer,
but poems awaiting cotton swab dreams, too.
And on the cluttered counter, a first line
on the tip of my pale rose lipstick that longs
for more.

The poems that broke my heart
are stuffed in the metal cabinet
with tear-stained details of
my son's diagnosis, MSA signatures
of two people who once loved, and
a cold stamp mark for bankruptcy.
They are filed behind the victory poem
of the new deed for this old house
with my name and my name only.

There's a haiku peeping from a young
girl's mirror that has linked
her newly emerged curves
with a vanilla moon.

A sun poem pours its cliche
of light prayer every day through the beveled
glass and onto my dining room floor.
It keeps me going.

And blue poems hide in the nettles
out back, the dying hibiscus, and the crack
in the carriage house window. These blues
linger among smooth sestinas of dragonflies
and bee balm.

But the best poem ever, yet to be written,
is brewing inside you, my love. I'd like
to think we could write it together, starting
now with my lipstick's first line.

From Toward the Light, Summer 2008.
Copyright Anjie Greene-Martin.
Used with the author’s permission.