MOTHER TONGUE Poems by Wendell Hawken Sue Generis Starts the Week • Kit Smart’s Cat • Pi, A Consideration from the Other Side • The Two-Lane After Aldie • Early at the Kitchen Window • Morning Stables • Ode to Spring • Shad Roe • Waiting for Rowena • Mother Goose • Driving Through Kansas, Considering Jerusalem Artichokes • Away • Walk with Dolphin • Paper Boats • Recovery • Catalpa Tree to Gardener • The Farmer’s Hour • Today • Rappie Pie • Reading Wislawa • A Morsel • The Night I Heard My Father’s Name • East End of the Hyphen • With Internal Bleeding from an Unknown Source, I Take My Mother for Her Third Transfusion • Visit to My Mother • Ghost • Uterus • Journey to the Brood Bitch • My Daughter Asks if I Had Morning Sickness • Sonograms • Webster’s Unified • Let the Names Escape Me $9.00 US • 52 pages Copyright © 2001 Argonne House Press. ISBN 1-88761-52-1

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Sue Generis Starts the Week

SUNDAY

Make me thin, Lord, and puff my lips
and stain them soupcan, boysenberry red.
Grant me Rapunzel’s hair,
B — or better — tits. Slim these 16 hips.
Please make me good in bed.

It’s Sundays, Lord. The afternoons
when time’s slow as summer, ten years old.
By two, my crossword’s done.
I’ve plucked both brows and washed the dirty spoons.
Next week’s been casserolled.

What undone was done to you, Lord,
that when 40 Virgo sought shy Pisces
you let such toadfish come?
I want a rainbow trout as my reward,
brook-bred, free from disease.

I don’t demand red watered wine.
On my account, don’t separate a sea.
Just skinny, Lord. And tits.
And stroll me through the Sunday streets benign
and clinging as a chimpanzee

beside a round-mouthed randy man.
I’ll take a bureaucrat from Turkistan.
Even a Republican.
Just one. I know you can.
Please, God, a dappled man.


MONDAY

I lock and double lock my door,
leave my chocolate in my Mr. Piggie cookie jar
(a birthday present to myself ),
leave the uumm of my refrigerator,
my bookmark in Anne Frank’s memoir.

Having moved my chia pet to
morning sun, jauntily I let my faucet drip
and leave those shadows on my sheets
the swells of mountain range my body drew,
that basin in my pillowslip.

Why smooth away geographies
and dreams? Why waste impressions gathered through my night?
All day I clack acrylic nails,
shrug off a jibe, perhaps, or thin lip tease,
pretend I’m anthracite.

My Himalayas wait for me.
My fertile crescents thrive. And Madagascar’s chin
yearns to curve again against my
thigh, feel the sweet crease of my knee —
my earth’s flat centered spin.