As Love Goes and Other Poems

By Peter Mladinic

As Love Goes

I loved a basketball player,
Shay, I called her, she called herself.
Shalonda.  An unremarkable student
in my classes, an unremarkable player,
her team less than stellar.
In a room with computers hulked along 
walls, a girl said, You come to our games,
we go to your classes, started the whole
shooting match, my Shay love.
Was it love?  Sure as I’m setting down 
words, and she loved me.

I sat at a desk, picked up a phone’s receiver
and took her call, a day frazzled with 
papers. I could have…effusive, more 
talkative, warmer. I miss the warmth that is
uniquely Shay, the light in her eyes, 
her face thin, dark, her stature tall, lanky,
on the short side of tall, not quite six feet.

What do I miss?  Her warmth. 
I miss her eyes, her angular face, 
her loose stride in a hall, on a campus. 
I miss mostly her loving me,
which took the shape of my reeling her in.
She was 18, 19, far from her home in Flint,
the day she and her friends were sorry
for my loss, my mother dead and buried.
My team, those girls, unruly I ruled, you go
to our games, we come to your classes.
I gave Shay my all, not enough,
as love goes.

In the snack bar she sat beside me, 
a long arm around my shoulder, that day
I’d come back from my mother.

One night, a game, Shay in a scuffle,
I felt like flying out of the stands
but stayed where I was. 

On the phone I could have been more
than a man at a desk strewn with papers.
In the two years I knew her, I rarely saw her
with a man, or romantic with anyone, always
with her girls, jostling near a fountain, and
in class Shay between two of her team.

A computer screen lights, her long fingers
tap keys, the room is silent, I’m up front,
the door open at a crack.  I miss her.

Pop Culture Elegy

Cornell Gunter

What America does with its singers,
it takes them out and shoots them.
Full of bullet holes they’re good and silent,
not a note.  It keeps them from singing 
truths it can’t bear to hear.  Cornell,
shot in a car parked, a street in Vegas, 
assailant unknown, cross-dressed, 
which isn’t a crime. With the Flairs, 
the Coasters his tenor rang too true. 
A bullet in a parked car. Same for Dyke, 
invented funk, Dyke and the Blazers.
It’s what America does with singers.

Sal Mineo

His absence among the most notable 
in American cinema: the community lined 
the tracks, the flat open car pulls up 
with the flag draped coffin of their Angel.  
Every eye fixated on the big screen’s 
earth meets sky horizon.  West Texas, 
Angel Obergon the soldier who died for us
the poor, the rich is home, is no more. 

Judy Tyler

No one saw Elvis cry.  He cried
on hearing of your fatal auto
accident near Rock River.  You
and the King had finished Jailhouse Rock.

On Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob said
girls and boys, here’s
Princess Summerfall Winterspring.  Your cue.
You playfully booted Clarabell’s rear,
his horn-like nose tooted
and extolled the benefits of Wonder Bread
to Phineas T.

The commute from Teaneck
into the City, the auditions and work
paid off, got you in Elvis’s movie.

Boyfriends

There are candies that look like bacon, 
French fries, hot dogs on buns. My 
Boyfriends, peach, dotted head to heel, 
come in a peach box with Boyfriends,
navy blue, on its face. I open it, bite into one.
My taste buds his heart sets aflame.
                            
I’m standing on a corner. Bill Frappier
comes up, May I have a boyfriend? He sticks 
his freakin’ hand in the box. I don’t mind, 
buzzed on Big Cat malt liquor. Have another, 
Billy. His hand goes in.  He chews the top 
half, from-the waste-down is in his hand.

He feels fire.  His sweat-beaded brow, 
like mine, my last boyfriend.  Sue Sakowski 
joins me and Bill. She too wants a boyfriend. 
Only this time, I open the box. Unlike Bill, 
Sue takes the whole boyfriend in her mouth. 
A cop drives up,  You three, move on.

In Sal’s, where I bought Boyfriends, Sal 
has the candies that look like hot dogs, 
French fries and bacon behind glass 
opened with a key, to keep away anyone 
who’d steal Boyfriends and other candies.  
Along a wall,  in a booth sits Nan Sidley, 

my big love from the past.  A month ago 
at a drive in, Bridge on the River Kwai
on the big screen, we necked in the back 
of a 57 Ford Fairlane. She was never mine, 
I’m over Nan.  Across from two girlfriends, 
she raises a vanilla egg cream to her lips.

Peter Mladinic’s fifth book of poems, Voices from the Past, is forthcoming from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA