You rescued me
riding on radio waves
from space, maybe
from Andromeda condensing
into a cathode ray alive
in black & white, your voice
steeply pitched & deeply chocolate.
Oh Julia, what were you thinking?
Filling my unripe head
with pressed duck & co co van,
all your cups with matching saucers.
I tweaked the Rabbit Ears,
you held my hands with your tongue,
guiding my motherless fingers,
to stir and scorch my way
through puberty, growing up
under the gaze of your gray
two dimensional eyes.
You delivered me
from TV dinner-land,
three cornered aluminum meals
my father left for his little
hungry birds to peck on
and abandon. But you,
Julia, you were such a big woman
swirling above me,
my saucer eyes watching you–
a great sonorous bird readying
your vivid recipes
for all the young owls of my mouth.
Deborah Wanzer lives and writes in Boston, Massachusetts. She has been previously published in: What Rough Beast, Poems for the Solstice (anthology), The New Republic, and The MacGuffin.