3 Poems by James Inskeep
TUESDAY
Tuesdays in La Junta are three months long. Everything that isn't seasonal isn't real. Change, like the people, is seasonal. The long coats and the winter wheat depend upon Tuesdays. The fixtures here could embarrass almost anyone. It becomes the unreal versus the non real versus the landscape. Such a history could be measured many ways. It could be measured by the color of the sediment in the bath tub, disco, Mexican girls, the new store front at J.C. Penney Company, mustard sardines and beer, or Peter Jennings doing the London segment of the news viewed by the locals. The tension depends largely upon petroleum. The tension is the ground being broken by four wheel drive John Deere tractors and the always present dust behind them. Chug-chug and the resultant land lies barren passing time, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes thumbing through the pages of the Burroughs seed catalogue until the water comes steadily enough to give the land a name. Cantaloupe, watermelon, corn, tomatoes, Wednesday.
TEASE ME
tease me into the sway
of your tied hair
that horsewalk now eating the
grass from beneath me
I FOUND AN EYELID
I found an eyelid in your elbow
how about the grass this green
fighting its way out of the ground
trying to talk to you
Copyright © 1981 by James Inskeep. These poems originally appeared in the 1981 issue of Accessories, A student literary/arts magazine published by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Back to poetry index