Seduction Technique
You can call me crippled so long as you don’t try to kiss me,
And go ahead! kiss me under the Mulberry tree so long as
You wait ‘til dark.
I have nowhere to be ever since last spring when a bad hand
Lost me my savings, a sack full of mismatched-misshapen
Buttons and a postcard from Tulsa addressed to one “Marie with the limp~”
Romantic that I am, I held that it was meant for me,
That I could read between the lines,
And by golly! it was meant for me.
Why no, I don’t have a limp. I just don’t
Walk, is all. What I’m trying to get to is for
You to kiss me.
All my hands are bad—both of ‘em, I mean.
It’s like there’s rot in the Mulberry. It’s like Tulsa is a world
Away. And what’s in Tulsa that has not crippled me,
You can’t say without it being cockeyed. And what’s that mean
For Marie with the limp, and where do
I go from here?
Stay buttoned up is all I know,
Walk straight through,
And I can plant one on you upstairs.
Read other writings by Miriam:
Broke Down Morning – A Short Story
The Young Women’s Guide to Making Bad Matters Worse
Look, I’m just going to work back through your posts and leave comments like I’ve wanted to for weeks. Anyway, I couldn’t get a hand on this one. (Get it? hur hur.) Unfortunately I’m not a very good reader of poetry unless it’s at least 1100 years old. (Also, am I allowed to be critical? I don’t know the rules for WordPress). The first few stanzas really moved–that is, they hitched. Intended to or not. And the spareness made me notionally put a box of buttons, a letter, a mulberry branch, and some amputated hands on a table and say, “ok you five, how did you get here, and what are you doing?” And the answer I got back was “hang on, we’re part of a longer poem,” as if this wants to be a much longer poem…
But this stanza didn’t click in, like the lines ended arbitrarily.
“You can’t say without it being cockeyed. And what’s that mean
For Marie with the limp, and where do
I go from here?”