Sunday night poetry interlude

So I’m rifling through every single thing I own, trying to toss what’s expendable and pack what’s not. I came upon my stack of Collages, dating back to the mid-’90s (working in what used to be the Student Publications office had many perks, one of which was access to back issues), and instantly remembered these two poems from the Fall 1997 edition that I’d fallen in love with when I encountered them back in 2001 or so. Both are by Mary Cummins. I’ve Googled her and the poems to no avail. I hope she’s out there still writing poetry, because the things she writes speak so softly but mean so much. Anyway. Here they are. Hopefully she won’t mind me sharing them here.

Honeymoons
by Mary Cummins

There was that time
in your mother’s house.
She had blue curtains
and flowerpots on the balcony,
watching the lake and our
occasional exploding
semi-melodramas
of those years,
way before she died
and we became calmer lovers.
It was some morning when
we argued over something,
maybe distances or faults
or the frying of eggs, and
she wondered why we visited
west Nevada every June
to pet her cats and shout
profanities in her kitchen.
You slammed some door
and I threw tupperware
at your stubbornness
and her hand-painted wall,
cringed as she surveyed
our splattered breakfast,
its plastic bowl
bouncing on the floor.
She shook her graying head,
clicked her tongue and said,
honey, it’s not love
’til you break something.

I don’t know you.
by Mary Cummins

You pour coffee
and I sell shoes.
You have Clark Kent eyes,
fuzzed goatee, a tattoo
round your bellybutton.
I wear big heels and my
mother’s college dresses,
line my lids in black.
Weekdays I size up customers,
wonder where I’m going
for lunch, send you good
mornings in corner glancing.
I hate life this way.
You give me chamomile tea,
dollars and soft fingers for change.
If one day I say hello,
I am twenty-two and stuck,
perhaps you would run
gentle hands over the ruins
I’ve made of these years.
I place my tired hair behind my ears
and go for doughnuts.
I offer you pennies,
my pressed skirt whispers please.