AIRSTREAM

In a mobile home shaped like a bullet, I kissed
      Irene's powdery breasts, her palms
cupping each to my lips, in 1974, when I was 7
      and she was 13, when Nixon ascended
the ramp of the plane, his face flushed with guilt,
      and America would never be the same.

We learn the hard way. We make our mistakes.
      My best friend Alan and I caught frogs,
thirty or more that day, held them pissing scared
      in our dirty hands, sliding them down
one after the other to be sealed in a cardboard tube,
      their bodies soft and cramped in that heat.

I remember our fear of being caught, our bodies
      flying over the neighbor's fence, spinning
and tumbling some, serene, effortless in the air.
      And I remember trying to sleep that night,
hushing the crickets to lay their instruments down,
      Irene's breast becoming the moon forever.

      ####

Brian Turner is a poet living in the Pacific Northwest.

He has poems published or forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, the Black Bear Review, L'Intrigue, SlowTrains.com, and in Clean Sheets.

"Airstream" is from a nearly completed collection entitled, How We The Damaged Touch, poems of the intimate and the erotic.

Brian can be reached at: AKungfufighter@aol.com.

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