Week 14 Draft

This is my workshop piece. I took a lot of the comments into consideration. Thanks! 

Draft 2: (10/25/2010)

In a Vegas Denney’s Thinking About My Lost Child, 1985

Looking out the window fogged with

scorched hash browns and hard coffee

the waitress aborts the flashing cowboy hats,

panty hosed sluts, and snapping impersonators

to the sands.

Here, in Denney’s, her chipped nails hold the past’s glasses

once filled with single malts and plastic ice until 5AM,

hands tinkering the ice, playing roulette and shooting craps,

and she hears the ancient roots of the desert call for another round-on

the house. 

 

Draft 3 (11/13/2010)

Inside the Denney's she looks out the window fogged with

scorched hash browns and hard coffee.

Thinking of floor 37, Room 2 when she

put bubbles in the champagne glass hot tub,

she lays a bent fork next to smudged spoons.

Taking out the soured towel, she wipes

that away, leaving the faint smell of bleach

and breast milk.

Out there the Vegas palms abort the flashing cowboy hats

where panty hosed whores strut.

The greats shoot craps and

drink single malts with plastic ice till 5AM.

The blades of newness slap

the salty, sweet, hard felt.

Clapping hands curl to embrace the feeling

of loss that surrounds the pyramids and

we all count plastic hardships in unison.

Water in the desert jolts to life tipsy roots

calling for another round-on the house.

Back inside, the waitress leaves

the check-all wrong and honest- getting

change for all she’s worth out here.

Week 12, How to Pick Bean Trees

Draft 2: (10/25/2010)

Gather up boat tires, flattened license plates, and excised Irish Catholics before heading

to the muddy ditches of creek bottoms.

Wash the burnt religion and the tacky smell of rotting bean flesh from the leathered skin

with dirt sneaking under square nail beds.

Split wood shells and mossy pods, dank with the backwoods of McGaha cove, before easing

in the masked stillborn cemetery.

Read the sacred heart notes and call before coming because the coffee might be

stale and the cards might still be on the table from the last wake.

Handle the snake, though the reading glass smudges with cyanide, before going out through the

deadheaded mums, the intoxicated hay and sterilized corn husks.  

Then, climb up, seeing the heavenly shoots, fall down into what you know too well to pick.