two poems by Patricia Caspers

Portrait of God as This Twelve-Year-Old Girl


God squirms against the scratch of an unnecessary bra.

God rides her bicycle to the market,

buys 50-cent chocolate bars and glass bottles of Coke.

She bleeds, and it’s not the red of ladybugs.

God writes secret love letters on an old typewriter and hopes

Someone and no one will read them.

God watches her grandmother die.

And doubts her existence.

God sleeps late.

God writes poems about unicorns.

God’s brain is the heat and snap.

Of a July sparkler at dusk.

God is the night she ran away.

God reads Judy Blume and doesn’t get it.

God nicks her ankle learning to shave—

her blood is the color of ladybugs and doesn’t stop.

God’s brain prunes synapses like sucker cane from the rootstock.

When she’s alone, God plays solitaire with a powdered deck,

practices walking in heels and wonders if she’s beautiful.

God captures ladybugs in a jar of grass,

stabs holes in the tin lid with a kitchen knife.



—

Portrait of God as a Damp Dish Towel


Useful and forgotten daily,

the dish towel sops milk spilled in shafts

of morning light across the kitchen table,

catches long, silver tendrils of slobber

as they dangle precariously

from the dog’s hungry maw.



Not an embroidered bird-flower cloth

or even a towel handed down

from grandmothers and worn delicate,

but a plain, cotton rectangle, snipped,

maybe, from an outgrown shirt.



It hangs from the oven door or

drapes the ever-dripping faucet.

Never quite dry, yet the towel works.

to unwaterlog saucepans and salad bowls

in their journey between rack and cupboard.



Once in a while, you call it a rag.

And remember a time when

demanding women were called rags, too,

and wonder at the origin of the epithet.



On the rag girls used to say in school,

before those rags became small, white bullets,

and then became unnecessary—

the relief and fear over the loss

of blood, or lack of lost blood 

Menarche inversed.



You think of this

As you hold the damp dish towel

in one hand and with the other

Lift a dry wineglass to your spouse.

Who stands before the sink, elbow-deep

in water gone cold, gone gray, soaked

In another kind of loss. You missed a spot,

you tell him, right there,

and rub your red lipstick

from the rim.

—
Patricia Caspers is an award-winning columnist, journalist, and poet. Caspers’ work has been published widely, and in 2017 California Newspapers Association named her the best columnist and education reporter in the state. Caspers won the Nimrod-Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and has published two full-length collections: Some Flawed Magic (Kelsay Books, 2021) and In the Belly of the Albatross (Glass Lyre Press, 2015). She is the founding editor-in-chief of West Trestle Review and hosts Silver Tongue Saturdays, a monthly literary reading series and open mic in Auburn, California.