I Don’t Own a Firearm
My pit bull Trouble,
an assault rifle with legs,
sits next to me on a love seat.
Clint, a Shepherd mix,
approaches us. Her bark
a mountain cat’s screech,
for 10 seconds I know
throughout my body
the meaning of “beast.”
When she kisses my mouth
her whiskers tickle.
Earlier today she tore
at a big plastic dog
food bag, and left it
in the corner of a crate.
Lies
I had my picture taken with Michael Jackson
at Disney World.
I got Eleanor Roosevelt’s autograph.
In Ascot Chang, a high-end shirt
store I said something bad
about Barry Manilow, not knowing he
was within earshot.
I played poker with the poet Muriel
Rukeyser in the White Horse Tavern;
I partied with Liz Taylor at a barbecue
in Wink.
In Sag Harbor Carl Bernstein
strolled, a ten-speed Peugeot
at his side. I wanted to say, “Aren’t’ you …”
but held back
from being who I could have been.
Toddler
She recently died.
I remember her as a toddler on a hill,
at the bottom, a big oak tree.
Blond, with heavy-lidded eyes,
a smooth, round nose,
she looked like her father,
only his hair was dark.
“What were my grandparents like?”
she asked, on social media.
Images flooded up from the past:
her grandmother’s hands
darning with needles a sweater,
the silver watch chain
across her grandfather’s black vest,
the crunch of acorns under my feet,
her grandmother telling me
not to walk on my toes, in a tone
that didn’t make me feel wrong,
but out of concern
I’d go forward as best I could.
For Tina Barry
Ernst Gombrich, the art historian,
gives a nod, in the gallery in my mind,
to Paul Laliberte’s watercolors, acrylics,
and oils. Paul lived in my home town,
he lives in the town you grew up in.
The Hackensack River separates the two.
I used to see the river from my window.
Today I see Paul, brushes and easel,
on a bank painting the other side’s trees.
I see him boarding a bus to New York,
at the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim,
and the Whitney. Did you, Tina,
ever stand in awe of a Turner at the Frick?
Or, on the riverbank, look across the blue
water, which was never blue for me?
ABOUT THE POET
Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.
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