Soothing Teas

my friends and cousin implored me to stay

at the bar when I twirled and told them, grinning,

I was leaving with three young men I’d just met.

next morning, when I drug back into the shack

I told the story of the mansion where I had landed,

such as the height of the ceilings and how many

bathrooms it had and of the host’s bragging

while serving liquor I had no appreciation for

and the endlessly seeming lines of cocaine

and exhaust of primo weed and the cobalt blue tile

of the kitchen counters and walls and the butcher

block isle below hanging every kind of copper

-bottomed pan and pot and of all the time

those boys spent on the phone futilitarian trying

to find prostitutes with no notice at three or four

in the morning and how disappointed they were

and how I allowed six hands all over me for six

crisp hundred-dollar bills and a sunny side up

and wheat toast breakfast with whipped butter

by sterling silver spreader

in air-conditioned sit down

and a forty-five-mile ride

home in the land rover after and when I looked up

at my cousin across coffee cups, she asked how

I always found the richest guys no matter what,

whatever room we would drop you in,

from hundreds

of men, you always pick them, every time,

how do you do it,

is it the shoes,

no anyone can buy shoes, I said,

but what then,

and all I could see were her fractured blue eyes

of our childhood,

it’s their eyes. there’s a comfort there.

it’s the comfort that attracts me.

it’s in their eyes.

she nodded so mildly

no one else must have noticed

but she and I knew

and we were back sitting on the bank

in scratchy grasses making sassafras tea,

with yellow sun baking our yellow and white

and ash and wheaten heads, fresh pulled and shook

in a bottle we found half full with mud

and washed out in the crystal creek

where there were no mothers

trading daughters to men in the dark


Originally published by Drunk Monkeys.

Photo credit: Plato Terentev.