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2 poems by Roberta Guthrie

Every Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right 


This is a love song for you,
Ani DiFranco,
from a fat old lady driving too fast
on a coastal highway.

For the record, Ani, 

I confess
I was thinking of them
(again)
when your words came slamming 
through my radio
and saved me.

I was thinking of them
and that
 thinning line between their bodies
where their hips meet,
in what I still 
think of as “our” bed,
thinking of thin slick spit where their mouths
and other parts 
come together,

But you
 stopped me 
right 
there, 
Ani,
at the point 
where you laughed
and said
 something about
your stretchmarks 
being highways
and 
I drove with my mouth stopped,
my brain hanging out the window,
its tongue flapping in the wind,
and I wrote this poem
 to you, 
my girl,
from a fat lady
 driving fast and laughing
on a coastal highway
 thinking about all 
the
 young girls
hunched and
 burning over a pen
a radio
a lover
a turntable spinning
a splendid view
and you
 and I will 
one day compare stretchmarks
highways
 and scars
, my girl.

We will
 sharpen all our folk songs 
into swords.

so you’re a dyke now

you said flatly
an accusation
(not a question)
making the patrons in the cafe
stop messing with the silverware

the question, unasked, you wanted me to answer
which I didn’t then, but will now, decades later:
Yes.
YESYESYES!

and (incredibly) it wasn’t about you,
or your penis,
your bad temper,
or your terrible poetry,
but more about soft skin,
perfumes,
being unpeeled like a soft ripe peach,
as opposed to being entered and filled like a window display,
or a locker you keep stuff in
when you’re doing something more important.

so maybe it
was about your penis,
but mostly it was your terrible poetry.

–

Roberta Guthrie Kowald first published at age 12 with a letter to editor of the Washington Post. In 1974 her family migrated to Australia. By age 19 she was appearing in well-known literary magazines (Luna, Art in Australia) and anthologies (Up From Below). Throughout the 1980′s  she was a popular performer on the spoken word circuit. In 1989 she developed crippling writer’s block and published only one poem over the next twenty years (Poetry Bay). Recent poems have appeared in Black Fox Literary Journal. Her short story I Am A Candle  appears in the Dark Moon Digest anthology Zombies!

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