Swell Zine: Poetry

when the days line up flat
one after another ahead of me
and i feel like a traveling salesman
whose territory is the wide, plowed,
sectioned-off midwest: contiguous squares
and rectangles chopped into rows
and columns, as orderly as abacuses,
never off-kilter for even a minute,

thinking of your body saves me.
i think of how we fit together—
your slopes and my angles
irregular, messy perfection.
i think of your oblong breasts,
the left smaller than the right,
how your resistant nipples harden
finally between my rubbing fingers
or against the insistent
beat of my tongue—taut moments when
my body understands rhythm
and teases and trains your pleasure
to the song that we're writing together

i think of the faint acrid smell of your smooth
slightly tan skin, the smell that clings to the strands
of your armpit hair, strongest when I rest my head
half against your large upper arm and half
against your chest, of how resting there
both stirs me and puts me at ease—sensations
the female body alone can synchronize.

i think of the way, sitting up, you examine
my body lying on the bed, marveled
by my collarbone or the new
leaves of shoulder muscle or the jut
of my pelvis like the current-scoured
stone you palmed before we met. and i remember
how your eyes drink me with the slow lap
of an animal accustomed to abundance,
your eyes that look and look
and still each morning
see me new, and then all the coming hours
begin to breathe that promise too

Reverse Mirror

loving you is beautiful the way eating a salad piled
with olives, mushrooms, veiny lettuce, then
whetted with balsamic is beautiful. how afterward
an energy and love of the world rise through you instead of
the enervating seep of a brick of fish 'n chips
eaten always on the days the world almost seems to be ending
anyway, so why not be dragged down along with it?

yes, the care of your words, the sweetness that lilts
your voice, the relish of your fingers as they take in my skin
in their disbelieving delight are part of what makes me
able to rest easy near you and show who i am
instead of the constant edge-of-my-seat
terror of not being good enough that i used to call love.

so it was funny to see the web-cam video you did
for the girlfriend you hadn't loved, knit hat pulled
over your ears, nary a smile, sounding almost annoyed
to be spending time figuring out the new gizmo
that would let you talk to her. watching you speak with your
palpable distance into the videophone that had brought you,
i was sure, not one step closer, i could see why she loved you.

if that video had been done for me, it would've
stirred me somewhere deep, the sliver of you that came through
would've trained my hunger for more, that eternal femme desire
to row to the other side of delicious toughness, to be let in, just
a little, to the even more precious—because carefully checked-vulnerability.
i knew that she was me, but less lucky. and i was her, but less piqued.

A More Delicate River

Coming home from a club in wee hours, a fox
jumps among median-strip bushes, just a black shadowy
shape, but somehow the levitation, the dance
of front paws, back rounded in hop
say fox. And before I can think any of this, my heart jumps
and falls back down, crushed, to earth,
the danger of the world suddenly breathtaking
and terrible. Not an hour earlier, I'd swayed
on the polished, beer-smattered floor
watching couples act out desire, searching
for some interesting, boyish woman, my body beating
out the rhythms of high school—mindless well of happiness

in retrospect. But the fox uncovers the traps
thoughtlessly set to get me there and back-
highways heaving and stretching
longer and wider, swallowing a strip of grass here,
a line of trees there, so that one day they may stop wending
and become the only "there." And the animals whose territories
span from one side to the other, what can they do
but take up the gauntlet to make brief use of what's still left?

Sometimes on I-5, as I traverse the 65
miles to work, an eagle flies over and circles
for a minute or two, peering down at the metal stream
apparently endless in rush-hour, and I know all of us
in the throb of the thoroughfare
propel the nightmare of another, more delicate river.

Ann Tweedy was born in 1971 and grew up in a small southeastern Massachusetts town where the smell of burnt chocolate from the Nabisco factory wafted over everything. She’s always been nerdy and shy, but she loves to face her fears and try new and difficult things. Even though she once thought she would lead a simple life, it has not turned out that way. Her poems wrestle with the same themes of dividedness that challenge and invigorate her daily life. She’s hoping to live her next life, assuming she has one, as the jellyfish called by-the-wind-sailor. For now, she makes her home in Washington state.