Skip to main content

John Tustin

Image
By
Peppermint

I was walking the frozen food aisle and I saw her in front of me,
Loading up her cart with frozen dinners.
She was just the right height and not a tattoo in sight.
Dressed in a thin jacket, blue jeans and sneakers,
She turned and looked at me as I stood there
And she gave me a smile before going back to her business.
Her eyes were something else, as grandma used to say.

I imagined she was forty years old, probably had two kids in high school or college
And she divorced her husband because he was unfaithful.
I imagined she was alone most nights and she painted them away while drinking wine.
I began imagining a lot of things standing there
While she read the ingredients on a box of Stouffer’s Lasagna.

I finally turned my face away, put my head down
And walked right past her.
She wore size seven sneakers.
She smelled like peppermint.
I went to the next aisle and then the next
And then I paid the cashier.
I didn’t see her again.

When I got to my car I started to think about it
As I loaded the groceries into the back seat –
If she smelled like spearmint instead of peppermint
She just might’ve had me.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. His first poetry collection from Cajun Mutt Press is now available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6W2YZDP . fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

By
                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony
2 comments
Read more

Weldon Kees

By
Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955 , which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared.  His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with  no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years.  James Reidel's book Vanished Act: t
3 comments
Read more

Mike James

By
 The River’s Architecture for Louis McKee, d. 11/21/11 The river has a shape you follow with your whole body: shoulder, footstep, and ear- those who know how to listen hear how river wind is like breath, alive in lung and line. Mike James makes his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He has published in hundreds of magazines, large and small, and has performed his poetry at universities and other venues throughout the country. He has published over 20 collections and has served as visiting writer at the University of Maine, Fort Kent. His recent new and selected poems, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His last collection, Back Alley Saints at the Tiki Bar, was published in April by Redhawk. He currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, TN.
1 comment
Read more