Jennifer Lagier- Three Poems & Photos

Small Game Collector

I was the hunter,

tracker of totems,

stalked jackrabbits

through Johnson grass thickets.

Along ditch banks, I turned

chunks of cement, seized

gliding commas of garter snakes,

blue-bellied lizards.

My fingers snatched

nervous swallowtails

from carnival clumps

of blooming lantana.

I enclosed each savage pulse

in the net of my acquisitive hand,

patrolled childhood's frontiers

to drag home the untamed.

Hometown Reunion

“Land of Peaches and Cream”

the familiar billboard

next door to a taxidermist’s shop reads.

A failing fruitstand

displays softening mounds

of hollow cored melons.

Here churches outnumber

gas pumps and grocery stores

by a two to one margin.

Driving by Bender’s Bakery,

I still taste those

tough-skinned ice cream cones.

Cruising the concrete shores

of a fading Bud’s Frosty, I discover

a balding high school alumnus.

He clutches a beer can,

just like the 60’s,

irremovably rooted.

Puppet strings from our canal bank past

wave my jerking hand

in embarrassed remembrance.

I roll past the city limits of guilt,

return to my great expectations’

tragic innocence.

Small Town Sex Education

It was the summer

high school boys bloomed

with octopus hands,

inescapable tongues,

atomic erections.

We compared contraceptive folklore

at slumber parties,

girls with awakening hormones

in shortie pajamas.

I learned how to smoke

filterless Pall Malls,

rat my hair,

kill militant semen.

Virginity seized me

in one vengeful claw,

whispered horror stories

of unwanted pregnancy

into my ear

using nun's voices.

I got tired of wrestling fingers

out of my panties, went on a

private hunger strike

against sexual freedom.

Punished appetite with hours of leg lifts,

solo runs around my dad's orchard.

Pinned baggy skirts as they fell

from my waist to the

tails of my empty-tent blouses.

Watched myself shrink

back to the safety

of flat-chested childhood.