Giving Up Cigarettes on Christmas Day in Southern California

                      

                                 JULIANNE             

     Whenever did you begin calling him Gerard?

                He’s your damned father.

                               HARRY

                Like you have such respect.

JULIANNE

                Well, I never called him Gerard.

HARRY:

                I heard you call him "pork rind" once.

JULIANNE

                No! I never! When?

HARRY

                That Christmas you came home from

                college, the first year. You said,

                give the pork rind his reindeer tie

                that he hates and make him wear it

                for me, cause I gave it to him when

                I was eleven.

JULIANNE

                Why pork rind? You made that up.

HARRY

                No, no, I did not invent that,

                Miz Julianne. You made some nasty

                comment about the stripe around his

                sweater when you walked through the

                door--said it emphasized his middle.

(Gerard pulls out a cigarette and starts to light it.)

JULIANNE

                Well, I must have been joking. That’s

                not like referring to your father as

                Gerard--put that thing out. I thought

                you were giving that up.

HARRY

                Just trying to annoy the old bat who

                sits here picking at brains.

JULIANNE

                It’s that fooh-fooh British dialect

                you’ve affected--is that what your

                English friends do--call their father Gerard?

Shortlisted

 The suitcase is heavy, almost unmanageable.

Oof. Then the other smaller one.

And backpack. I travel uneasy, heavy.

All I own on my person—notebooks, teddies, Christmas ornaments.

10 years dreaming of Scotland,

met with resistance, stony faces, grilled with questions:

If the awards ceremony is one night

why are you staying a month?

I’ve emptied my account for this, why not?

My judge boozed up, forgets his notes on me,

my poetry a second thought.

This heart inside my chest is an Amazon. She rears and claws,

forgetting she is old woman fading, remembers spotlights.

He calls me a name I don’t use…I thought he knew.

My Amazon hisses. She explodes the light.

She winds tendrils of metal around his soul.

She inflates to suck his air.

She leads me over his carcass as I walk to the door,

where they hand me the winning pamphlet

already printed, with acknowledgements by the poet.

I accept with grace and move down stairs,

step out of the building where thunder cracks into applause

and stars roll down my cheeks with the tears.