[11] "100 Things I Don’t Think about When I’m Driving Alone at Night on the Alabama Interstate"

100 Things I Don’t Think about When I’m Driving Alone at Night on the Alabama Interstate
by Deidre Price

1. Whether I took my vitamins this morning
2. The guy who called me a whale in the seventh grade
3. How much of a vitamin C deficit a person needs to get pirate-grade scurvy
4. The cost of Blockbuster rentals
5. Phar-mor and how excited I was to get a video rental card when I was a kid
6. How I used to bike to TG&Y with Ashley to get wax bottles and candy cigarettes
7. How I used to take credit card applications in department stores to fill them out for fun
8. How much fat is in Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream
9. The date of my next period
10. My high school GPA
11. My parents’ telephone number
12. Realizing how fat I’d gotten when the swing judgmentally pinched my thighs
13. How it would be nice to visit moments in the past but not be younger in them
14. The number of times I cried in high school
15. How I used to swing in the backyard and sing to myself, imagining that an agent was in my neighbor’s backyard and might discover me
16. Thin and falling neck skin
17. My mother’s china cabinet
18. My allergy to penicillin, the wrath of which I was too young to recall
19. My college GPA
20. The date of my last period
21. The deep cut I got when I fell off a seesaw and a friend jumped off her side to help me, making my side come crashing down into my skin
22. How walking a block can feel like more than a block when you’re bleeding on every square of pavement
23. The number of times I’ve cried in front of my children
24. My grandmother’s Lenox Christmas china
25. How I used to ask for ‘grease’ when I meant butterbeans
26. STDs that strangers have
27. How I was once yelled at for singing at the dinner table
28. How I have complete and utter indifference about Cher’s career
29. The number of times my husband has cried in front of me
30. How good the Taco Bell cantina bowl is
31. Benny Hinn
32. Benny Hill
33. Benny and Joon
34. Benny and the Jets
35. The B I got in American literature because I resented the professor's come-ons
36. How I can’t eat strawberry wafer cookies because I vomited them once
37. How VHS tapes used to seem like investments
38. The bunion on my left foot
39. How a boy broke up with me while he played wall ball
40. How many times I begged my mother for a perm in the fourth grade
41. My luau birthday party
42. Friends on whose bodies I can point out birthmarks through clothing
43. My skating rink birthday party
44. The burnt sienna crayon I was happy no one else liked
45. My tea party birthday party
46. How my Barbies were usually my brother’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ groupies
47. How Drew and I bungeed my Barbie hot tub to the top of the Chipmunks’ tour bus
48. My tenth grade social studies teacher and how I wasn’t ‘smart enough’ for AP History
49. How teachers think they can tell whether someone is ‘smart enough’ when they lecture from a transparency crank filled with the outline of a previous version of the textbook on an overhead projector and hardly know your name
50. How I’m not bitter about things
51. How I had to look up the word ‘groupies’ embarrassingly late in life
52. Peanut butter filled peanut shaped cookies and how clever that is
53. Nearly all of the presidents
54. The question on the CTBS test that asked me about stirring sauce with a wooden spoon
55. My parents’ mortality
56. My brother
57. Skin tags
58. The state of the college
59. Why Walmart’s Subway smells so awful
60. How I don’t enjoy showers like I used to
61. The Dakotas—both North and South
62. The dust on the tops of my fans
63. Dead grass in our yard
64. How I’m slow in the bathroom sometimes because I need the quiet
65. Ambrosia
66. Stretch marks
67. Whether Jenny still has the number 867-5309
68. Cancer and people who have it
69. How sad it is that the hardest I’ve ever prayed was when I went parking and we had to walk to Movie Gallery’s pay phone to call his dad to dig us out when the car got stuck
70. How it takes over ten years for me to put some things in print
71. Laundry
72. How I never made my bed growing up but always had a made bed
73. Salt cellars, which are awesome
74. People who think they’re writers, artists, or photographers but aren’t by my definitions
75. How long it takes for the in’s to accept the out’s
76. Scientology
77. The fact that I’ve never seen Spaceballs
78. My not knowing whether Caddyshack is one word or two
79. Vaccinations and autism
80. The Salem Witch Trials
81. The Scottsboro Boys
82. What determines when one replaces a shower curtain
83. Whether I have a superpower because I can work the microwave, but my husband can’t
84. Why, of all things, my superpower would relate to a small kitchen appliance
85. Invisibility and electromagnetism—happening on the same day
86. Fabric softener
87. My secret obsession with nachos and other foods that are piled instead of arranged
88. Robots who do nonessential tasks
89. How to clean grout
90. Why Woody has a snake in his boot when he should clearly be acclimated to the range
91. Reducing, reusing, or recycling
92. Sexy triplets and why guys get excited about that, like they can handle it
93. Sonic Youth
94. “Electric Youth”
95. Things I know that I shouldn’t know, was told never to repeat, and haven’t
96. MYF and ‘snack supper’
97. Microwaving things in Styrofoam
98. The myth that secrets don’t make friends; sometimes they do
99. Milky Way—the galaxy, not the candy bar
100. How sad it was that Picasso and Gertrude Stein couldn’t get it on

[10] "When Bathtimes Come"

When Bathtimes Come

by Deidre Price

Ten fingers spread wide with wonder

held a nine-month belly,

a world in the middle of me,

heaved it up and over

after two large legs

into manmade rain.

Puddle turned pool.

Bowing into my second self,

hands found hamstrings

then a porcelain ledge.

I lowered my selves

into a shallow silence.

Leaning back, I saw streams

the color of tears, tiny continents

on the still of my stomach.

…

When bathtimes come,

I remember these days:

some dreams, half submerged,

but both our heads clearing the water.

[9] "Awkward Verbal Ogling of a Clothespin in a Public Place, or Springy Thing o' Mine"

Awkward Verbal Ogling of a Clothespin in a Public Place, or Springy Thing o’ Mine

by Deidre Price

For Emily Dickinson

You’re a springy thing

                         and you’re mine.

I’m springy, too, sometimes.

I see you’re red.

I get red, too, sometimes,

oh, springy thing o’ mine.

I bet you’ve held laundry on a line

                                                        or two?

Maybe even two at a time?

When I air my dirty laundry, I think of you,

Springy-thinged Valentine.

I hoist it all high.
I hoist it all mighty,

whether it be boxer

                                   or whitey tighty.

When they blow in a hard June breeze,

they sometimes fall

past knotty knees

and conjure a confession

like a habit on a head

and a surrender,

a pale flag over all these

forbidden words I’ve said.

[8] "A Series"

Read the Spring 2014 issue of The Penwood Review for this poem.