Photo by Maria Angelova on Unsplash
my friends and cousin implored me to stay
at the bar when I twirled and told them, grinning,
I was leaving with three young men I’d just met.
next morning when I drug back into the shack
I told the story of the mansion where I had landed,
such as the height of the ceilings and how many
bathrooms it had and of the host’s bragging
while serving liquor I had no appreciation for
and the endlessly seeming lines of cocaine
and exhaust of primo weed and the cobalt blue tile
of the kitchen counters and walls and the butcher
block isle below hanging every kind of copper
-bottomed pan and pot and of all the time
those boys spent on the phone futilitarian trying
to find prostitutes with no notice at three or four
in the morning and how disappointed they were
and how I allowed six hands all over me for six
crisp hundred-dollar bills and a sunny side up
and wheat toast breakfast with whipped butter
by sterling silver spreader
in air-conditioned sit down
and a forty-five-mile ride
home in the land rover after and when I looked up
at my cousin across coffee cups, she asked how
I always found the richest guys no matter what,
whatever room we would drop you in,
from hundreds
of men, you always pick them, every time,
how do you do it,
is it the shoes,
no anyone can buy shoes, I said,
but what then,
all I could see were her fractured blue eyes
of our childhood,
it’s their eyes. there’s a comfort there.
it’s the comfort that attracts me.
it’s in their eyes.
she nodded so mildly
no one else must have noticed
but she and I knew
and we were back sitting on the bank
in scratchy grasses making sassafras tea,
with yellow sun baking our yellow and white
and ash and wheaten heads, fresh pulled and shook
in a bottle we found half full with mud
and washed out in the crystal creek
where there were no mothers
trading daughters to men in the dark
Ranney Campbell is author of the poetry chapbooks, "Pimp," "Charcoal and Ink,” "the desert so," and “Caddish.” Other of her creative writing has appeared in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Storm Cellar, Reed Magazine and elsewhere. She is from St. Louis, but lives in the extreme southernmost Sierra Nevada of California.