We’re turning the color of the seats in the Camaro
speeding down the wrong side of the street. It’s the year
of the divorce, the new man’s house, his rules, his chair,
his cuts of meat bleeding into butcher paper off-limits.
My brother fries up liver in defiance, blends protein
drinks with ground bull balls, works out at the gym,
disappears after he is caught kissing his girlfriend
in our mother’s new waterbed. I fought for this ride,
brought the city boys to the door so my mother
could ask their names and shake their hands, maybe
she read it would make them behave in one of the books
she kept on the back of the toilet, Cinderella Complex,
My Mother My Self. I read them too, Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying and “zipless fuck” contextless
before sex. My best friend in the front seat wears no
seatbelt, the boy I’m crushed on next to me in the back,
cologne and gold cross on a chain I confuse with a holy
heart, Heart with the force of Jong on the radio belting
“Barracuda.” The boys pour us vodka as the amber
hulls of redwood trunks and green leaves in one
continuous blur pass punctured with spots of white
lights of oncoming cars. I pray to the Angel
of Death: Let me walk from this car, take me back
to my father’s house. I can see the cover of Life
after Life on his shelf, its Jackson Pollack splotch
of white a rough haloed orb like a cell dividing.
—Honorable Mention, the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize 2017; first published in the
San Diego Poetry Annual 2017-18 (Garden Oak Press, February 2018) and appears
here with permissions from the publisher and the poet
is the author of November Butterfly: Thirteen Writing
Prompts Based on the Power and Creativity of Iconic Women (Saddle Road Press,
2014). Her collaborative micro movies feature poetry paired with the photography
of Robyn Beattie and the music of Stephen Pryputniewicz. Three of those photo poem
montages—She Dressed in a Hurry (for Lady Diana), Amelia, and
Nefertiti Among Us—received the Juror’s Award for Best of Show
(2D-3D 2012: Visual Poetry Works Inspired by Literature & Poetry) at San Joaquin
Delta College (Delta Center for the Arts: LH Horton Jr. Gallery), and
may be viewed online.
Her poetry and prose have appeared in Autumn Sky, Blast Furnace, Blood Orange
Review, Chiron Review, Connotation Press, Extract(s), In Her Place, Journal of Applied
Poetics, Linebreak, Literary Mama, Nimrod International, NonBinary Review, Patria
Letteratura, Poetry Flash, Prairie Wolf Press, Prime Number Magazine, Salome Magazine,
Silver Birch Press, Soundings East, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stone Canoe
(online), The Mom Egg, Tiny Lights, Whale Road Review, and Writers and
Lovers Café.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Pryputniewicz teaches poetry at San
Diego Writers, Ink as well as online writing classes. She lives in San Diego with her
husband, two children, and a Siberian Husky; and is now at work on her second book,
The Fool in the Corn: Leaving Stelle’s Dreamfield, based on her
childhood experience of living on a commune in Illinois.
Author’s website: www.taniapryputniewicz.com