Carol Zapata-Whelan has published in "Newsweek," "The Los Angeles Times" News Syndicate, and in scholarly publications. She teaches Spanish and Spanish American literature at CSUF.
The first time
That night we had to stare hard at the wedding cake
Don't personalize
A pillow between my knees
In broad daylight,
But these days
you crossed
ahead of me
we were in Massachusetts,
by the quaint-blue harbor of spiky white masts, bobbing;
the morning air like a glove,
Miguel's hand at
his wife's elbow
ceiling of the Ritz for a plan, and for the first time
I felt
panic
said the therapist,
with that permanently startled look
Don't personalize
Light between the slats
Your breath so ignorant
You might have
held it, stretched it out
in peace like
a hand in the dark
Resentment
turned the key
like
a prodigal son
Miguel lives in Mexico with a Finnish girl.
We live in the Heartland,
and you sink black dress shoes in the crusted furrows, still
crossing ahead, soothing the yellowed hands of your pistachio trees.
Somewhere on Minnewawa
Walt Whitman was with me today, not in a California supermarket, but in a Fresno Taco Bell
Unseen, Walt Whitman, you saw, too.
there's Walt Whitman, I tell my sons.
He's in a pick-up, in no-color overalls,
his name probably stitched over a breast pocket.
Avid, he picks something up off the street and drives on when
the light changes.
where the line loitered,
where an old couple rose from the formica laughing,
where the mexicano waited, hatless, solemn, at the salsa island,
where the young manager made good-natured complaint,
where skaters with bleached hair propped the glass door and swaggered on, drinking through straws,
where a mother held with difficulty her red-faced child,
where a father in the drive-thru reached angrily over his seat,
where people ate with decorous posture and small sisters played,
where my little daughter raised her chin for a napkin.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway2002. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Carol Zapata-Whelan 2002. All rights reserved.
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