“Mortal Enemy,” “Men Think They’re Jesus,” and “Baseball”: poems of rivalry within and between the sexes, by Barbara Daniels.
“The degree of failure is perfect …”
Mortal Enemy
-
I like that color, she told me,
but not on you, jeering
at my pink sweater. One day
my lacy blue half-slip slid
to the floor right by the mailboxes.
She and a man she knew
laughed. She wrote our bosses
furious letters about me.
She hadn’t been loved
enough. But which of us has?
I stood in the shower inventing
replies to her. If I’d learned
not to hate her, I would’ve felt
cleaner. I saw how ugly
the heart is, my heart, that raw
little animal. I sent her an email
all about chemo, a trip
to an underworld she might
come back from. She took
her time to blame me and die.
**************************************
Men Think They’re Jesus
-
Women think about washing their hair,
rubbing their thighs with sweet-scented oil.
Men think they’re Babe Ruth, fat, yes,
but great and swaggering. Women slump
their broad bellies, glad to be warmed
by a golden day. They’ve had their babies,
their wild boys; been maidens, been
hoydens. Hot handed, wide bodied, men sit
on webbed lounge chairs and dream
about walking on top of salt seas.
They rise up to kiss Marilyn, Mary, placid
as sunflowers tipped toward the sun.
******************************************
Baseball
-
The old cosmopolites complain about
the new cosmopolites. They have better
food — kitfo and wat, barbacoa,
mixiotes — and they look like poets. The old
cosmopolites learned some Yiddish
back when Brooklyn belonged to them —
Coney Island, summer, the Dodgers,
the best place for bagels. We’re the true
immigrants, they say to each other.
They find baseball flawless — the kinds
of pitches, the number of outs.
At the ballpark the wind has a separate
habitation out past a screen of trees.
The degree of failure is perfect. The clock
runs forever. Few people score.
Beyond the gates the new cosmopolites
headbutt soccer balls. The old cosmopolites
turn toward their shouting, yawn in the sun.
*************************************************
Barbara Daniels is the author of Rose Fever: Poems (WordTech Press) and the chapbooks Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, and Quinn & Marie (Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press). She has received three Individual Artist Fellowships for her poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, The Literary Review, and many other journals.
