want badly
Tricia Taaca
dancing girl press, 2011
$7.00
Originally from the midwest, Tricia Taaca moved to New York to earn her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and become a cheesemonger. Currently, she lives in Harlem where she spends her days teaching aerobics, baking, writing poems, and cavorting with her dog, Mister Peanut. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Lumina, Chaffey Review, Sonora Review, Washington Square Review, and Harpur Palate. She teaches poetry at Berkeley College.
Amber -or- What the Crone at the Field Museum Explains
Caveman Gave to His Cave Sweetheart
My friend Jimmy finally found the right woman
to don a nun’s habit and fuck him
with a strap-on. And some say there’s no such thing
as true love. If that’s the case, explain how
a man in Harlem wakes up at 4am for a glass
of milk while a woman in Brussels
eats a whole plate of cookies by herself.
Explain how babies stir in the soup of womb
to the wooden spoon of Mother’s voice, how
you spent adolescent suppers banishing
lima beans to plate rims, while I shamelessly ate
playdough pellets.
And those bald eagles—
who mate in tangles of feather and claw,
cartwheel and five hundred foot freefall.
A man shuffles his tennis-ball-bottomed walker
back into the cardiac rehab waiting room, looking
for his wife. The receptionist lipstick-whinnies,
Mr. O’Connell, maybe she’s gone off
with a younger man. He smiles despite
heart failure, despite literally a broken heart,
She wouldn’t leave me he says, despite
three wars, despite the cynicism of the young
and beautiful, We’re two peas in a pod.
Somewhere in this city, buttercream
frosting is destined to kiss cupcakes in backlit
bakery cases. When we finally meet, I will take you
tidal wave, all salted breath and starfish.
Handle my body as a beggar handles
a loaf of bread, hot off the truck. My mouth
already knows the shape of yours
like a bedtime story,
a nightstand prayer.