Unremembered Roads( in Yellow)
Leon Kolokowksi claimed my hymen.
He was forty and played third cello with the Boston Pops,
his sausage fingers more at home in a deli cooler
than on a cellist's lithe, dancing hands.
I had turned fifteen that sixties summer
and was obsessed with my sexual evolution.
Leon's father was Polish, his heritage
dating back to royalty--
or so he said.
Evenings, when Leon wasn't rehearsing,
and mother was at Bible meetings,
we 'did it' on the oriental rug,
Leon's hands raising my buttocks high,
head buried between my legs,
watering the rug's rhododendrons
to near dew point,
'til mother's foot hit the first step.
When mother visited Aunt Claudia,
Leon took vacation time, pressing me hard
against my childhood bed nightly,
elephatine fingers playing my body,
sunset to sunrise;
I, his cello and most appreciative fan.
Sometimes I fancied myself married to Leon,
birthing dozens of fat fingered infants
playing miniature cellos as they slid
down the birth canal together.
Noisy in his lovemaking,
Leon had a passion for cannons
inherited from his mother's side of the family
and dating back to the Spanish Wars.
He insisted on playing a tape of the 1812,
cannon section, of course,
through our open window,
yelling Ho LA at the top of his lungs
and plunging deep inside me,
before he spewed
in time to that black steely
pow pow pow
at the end.
When I turned sixteen,
Leon married a flat-chested violinist,
moved away in a great rush
of baggage and loud kisses.
I developed a crush on a boy down the block.
Tommy played snare drum in the marching band
and looked like Al Pacino in that later Godfather movie.
Despite all of my attempts to entice,
Tommy never tried anything more
than thrusting his tongue
down my throat and touching
one breast on our porch,
moths circling the light above us
and Ma Nature thundering disapproval
with flashes of yellow
at the foot of our suddenly silent street
Pris Campbell
(c)2003
Published in MiPo quarterly, Spring 2004
To see this poem in its publication, click HERE.
Didi Menendez,
