Three Poems by Pattie Flint

Glass Box Waltz

blown wrists and fingertips

like  teacups rimed with Sunday afternoon

sugar cubes. I open you

and you dance for me alone.

Crystal shins stretch painfully

downwards into velvet folds

where I keep my mother’s diamond

ring. Your tin vibrations are

foxes crying in shards of sunset.

When I put on my evening jewels,

I want to weep for you;

holding keep over

treasures you never wear;

spinning round and round in circles

and going nowhere.



Cotton Balls

Tell me the color of cinnamon
without using the word red.  I like
your gingersnap lips and the way
they sting the insides of my
elbows like peach fuzz burns from
the summer we climbed trees
using only our knees.  I can't tell
you how much your metal retainer
turns me on in a way I can't
defend.  But maybe you can put
these words in your mouth like
those old pennies and know that I
am alive.  Pick the flowers only
after they've died so you can
remember eating rose petals
at father's funeral, soak cotton
balls in honey and put them on
my tongue so I can taste your
laughter.




French Cherries

Grandmother didn't have the patience
to teach you how to tie french knots
because you are left-handed
and born in the year of the horse.

Instead you learned with cherry stems
and numb coca cola tongues
on hot july nights with me.

We anchored ourselves in the Sound's
dark waters and tickling dinoflagellates
remember rough kisses on
the skin of our knees like grown movies
we watched when we were too young for them.

Pattie Flint is an uprooted Seattle native toughing it out in New England and spends her days as an editor at Medusa's Laugh Press specializing in hand-bound books. She has been published in InkSpeak, HESA Inprint, Hippocampus and TAB, amongst others. She is currently working on her MFA at Cedar Crest College.