Mannequin Envy
quarterly journal of poetic and visual art
Featured Artist:
Theresa Pfarr
More artwork by:
Cecilia Ferreira
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Tim Mayo
Portulacca
Portulacca, I said, Por-tu-lac-ca?
to the young girl at the nursery,
and she smiled, her eyes brightening
from some memory like jewels
turning in a light I couldn’t see.
She looked around then said,
We’re sold out,
her eyes taking on another hue.
All around us things flowered
in the misty gray,
red, orange, pink and blue,
as though shouting
against the sunlessness of the day.
Portulacca--a plant I didn’t know,
I was just buying for a friend,
when from that old greenhouse
inside me where all the plants
jostled and groped for more dark,
the word suddenly blossomed
burning through almost like a sun,
and for that one moment it hung
between us, a bright talisman,
before the gray air erased it,
and I went home to my friend.
Red Convertible
For Laura
You call me about your car--why does it smoke?
I want to say desire has caught your engine
and your well oiled heart has frozen from the heat.
--Or should I use the male vocabulary I’ve heard
around the bottles of beer at cook outs
when the men gather at one end of the table
and the women find themselves at the other
turning over the lumpy potato salads of their lives?
In the end I take the male high road--I
suggest your radiator leaks under pressure.
I, too, leak under pressure. The hot air puffing
up my chest sighs down like a balloon,
and the hero in me suddenly sees himself
as ordinary as the man who gets on the bus
in the morning and steps off in the evening
knowing nothing but the humdrum of his heart,
hoping for the red convertible of your smile
to pass by and give him a lift.
| Tim Mayo has been a member of the Author Committee of the Brattleboro Literary Festival since it’s inception in 2002. His poems have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Del Sol Review , The Rose & Thorn, Paris/Atlantic, Four Corners, Poet Lore, 5 A.M. and The Chrysalis Reader. He was a Semi-Finalist in the “Discovery”/The Nation 2000 Poetry Contest and recently received a grant from the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT . For the past year and a half he has been studying Trapeze and other circus arts at Nimble Arts Trapeze and Circus School in Brattleboro, Vermont. |
photo by Joe Templin |
Girl In Pink Gloves, 2005, oil on canvas, by Theresa Pfarr