Corn Goddess

by Stephanie Dickinson

Corn Goddess

In the farmhouse it is a summer Saturday night and there is too much moon to sleep

Although she hears her grandmother snore from
downstairs and crickets clamor so loudly
they seem to chirp from the closet where her grandfather’s
old suits drown in cellophane. She kneels
before the screen. Such a blaze—
tall green corn stalks gleam with dew. She wants
to walk into corn in her just beginning body,
breathe the mustiness and lick the green
of its sweat.

Instead she tiptoes down the hall to the guest room where her brother slumbers in
the bride bed with heavy walnut bedboard.

His blond friend is awake in the chair with cushions
that feel like cattail skins. Come here, he says,
pulling her into his lap. He kisses her, his teeth tiny
like the milk teeth of baby ear corn. He wears glasses
and her nose bumps them when he slides tongue into
her mouth. She wants him to take his kiss out
when she hears steps on the stairway.

A hand touches its way along in the dark. It slips along the banister’s smoothness.
What is it?

But she goes back to kissing and drinking in
the nearness of the forbidden bed where the uncles and
their wives slept under the green spread, thighs
on ironed sheets. This is what after midnight feels like.
A boy’s lips tasting the same as his fingers. But
what is coming out of him, inching up her leg?

The air thickens, smells of talc and field corn, of ears turning to kernels of dirt, mice surviving
blind in corncribs of half a century ago.

Moon streams from her grizzled yellow hair that reaches
to her knees, a quivering corn silk. Her mouth opens.
“Bad girl,” grandmother hisses, a gopher hole into toothless black.

Truck

All day there was a truck parked on the seawall.

It stood before the fickle drinking fountains, a refrigerated

truck that hauled red snapper and amberjack.

Now it held people and all the cold had vanished.

Metal shell sizzling to heat that hissed when they spit at it.

Twenty-three men and women up from Monterrey

who’d given a year’s wages for this waiting.

Not even the driver had keys. The walls were seamless

like the skin of a sardine and burnt their fingers when

they struggled to find a way out. The man who was

to come had been frightened off by a police car, patrolling

the roller bladers and licking hibiscus.

The man went to The Cut, into the twilight

of stamp-sized dance floors and barmaids wearing

leather holsters to carry greasy bottles of tequila.

It was good to wait until night to go back.

He would find a girl with lips of feathers.

He would find a girl with legs of a flamingo.

But he disappeared into his own withering and

the fetid bay breezes made the day go on and on

and the great heavy sun was whitening their cries.

There was a boy in the truck who put his mouth

to the sealed door, said it was air he was breathing

the flutter of a gull’s wings, but it was his pulse racing.

Outside there were people who would have helped.

The truck was speaking to the girl in orange bikini

as she lathered on coconut oil, untied her straps

and lay in the unraveling flames. What is it?

Once she looked up, but it was hard to hear over

Madonna singing in her voice of spoiled blue cheese.

Then bronzed hands lifted volleyballs, spanking them

over a net, and the bay water glazed into grayness

that brought in blue muscles of jellyfish.

The boy in the truck floated away from himself

dreaming of sheephead fish with tiny human teeth

trying to breathe out of the sea.