Paige Deshong
pdeshong@austincc.edu

Paige DeShong lives in Austin with her 4-year-old son. She has taught creative writing at Austin Community College for six years. Before that she lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico where she received her MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her poems and reviews have been published in journals including RHINO, Sin Fronteras, KIOSK, Puerto del Sol, and Prosodia. She received the Robert A. Wichert Award and the Joe Somoza and Keith Wilson Award for Poetry. She curated Tierra Cruzada, Crossed Land, an exhibition of poetry and photographs for which she received grants from New Mexico State University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Another Summer of Forest Fires for the Sunshine State

My love is inside watching The Truman Show and I am outside listening for deer in the fire break, among other things, because I cannot bear to be within listening distance of the TV; I am TV’ed out. A digital cone traps like flies hundreds maybe thousands of channels in its blue aura. I can’t bear to be apart from him either. I’m a fire hazard everyday in these tan evergreens. Everything is tan except the sky which is a uniform blue like The Truman Show before Truman tries to sail away. Twigs snap before they spark so I rub the nubs together. Destiny is the circumference of a blow-up pool. The more complicated life gets, the more we stream it down to nods. Dog to dog, breakfast to lunch, point A to point B via the movies, 4 to 5 lbs the pork loin. The meat man became ecstatic when I read him the particulars as dictated by The Best of Southern Homes and Gardens Cook Book. He disappeared for nine minutes as I compared the labels of crab boils until he reappeared with the meat cradled in his arms, a new born just pushed and pulled from a womb. We exchanged exaggerated praise, embarrassing us both. Loneliness is a kitchen suffused with multivitamins. The pork loin was dry but cooking it kept my nails away from my cuticles for a few hours. Loin means the side and back between the pelvis. It was also an excuse to drive 45 minutes to the nearest supermarket, Winn Dixie in the town of Okeechobee where my love’s car broke down in the Taco Bell parking lot. I bit my cud to contain the guffaws as he pounded the hood hard. Glee is discovering anything even a radish in the dirt. Walking to the Diamond Shamrock took us right past the flea market. Pure Glee, pumping 21 cents of gas into a plastic Taco Bell cup, standing at the counter as it explodes like a water balloon hitting a car, gasoline all over us, the counter, the red apron, except this explosion took no provocation, only tiny atoms loitering. The science may be vague but the emotion, I understand intimately. Danger is everywhere and practically free.

Sunday Morning

No funerals and the corner is free
of traffic. The radio said
this is the last weekend of summer
so the temperature fell.
Clipped days urge the evenings indoors.
Vaguely I regret something said.
Sitting on pale furniture, the cats
cry to go outside
where oddly the dogs are quiet
until a woman jogs by.
Clenched fist pull her chest forward
into the wet road. I dial ex-boyfriends
who speak in cushioning tones,
mostly they listen.
Rain slouches like night
dropping static on the metal shingles.
Coaxed by conversation
and the smell of rain, the thing said
comes out into a clearing.

Trespassing at Barton Springs in July at 3 am

The calm of the long dark water is ours to break
and we do. It’s warmer to the blood than usual,

most likely the watermelon slush at Chris’s
an the wine at the crown and serpent.

Under black emerald glass, clear light darkness
mingles with grass and algae and for once

we are not trespassers on this earth. We forget
that we’re drunk, restlessly happy and separate

until the chill deepens, nagging and we climb out
onto the cement floor like slow reptiles.

Where are the police? Ty paces along the tree line,
John lies on a boulder and stares. The moon,

a sharp crescent, holds less than a heaven away.
Mars is too close to twinkle. Mike’s skin is cold

then warm. I’ve slid in next to him on the lifeguard stand.
From here the springs reveal themselves ceaselessly

churning, fathomless in rinsing starlight.
An east breeze shivers through us. The sprinklers

on the far lawn come off and on. We say something.
Ty pleads that we go and, finally sleepy, we heave

ourselves back over the eight-foot chain link,
up the hill and into our fast cars.