Catherine Bowman is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University and the author of the poetry collections NOTARIKON, ROCK FARM, and 1-800-HOT-RIBS which was reissued in 2000 by Carnegie-Mellon University Press as part of its contemporary classics series. Her writing has been awarded the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and four Yaddo Fellowships. She was the recipient of a faculty teaching award and the IU President's Arts and Humanities Award. Her poems have appeared in six editions of BEST AMERICAN POETRY as well as many other literary magazines and journals, including The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, River Styx, The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Sycamore Review, Open City and Conjunctions. Her work has also been published in several anthologies including AN EXHALATION OF FORMS,THE EXTRAORDINARY TIDE: NEW POETRY BY AMERICAN WOMEN, INKING THROUGH THE SOUL: WRITERS ON WRITING, MOTION: AMERICAN SPORTS POEMS, ALOUD: VOICES FROM THE NUYORICAN CAFE, BLUES POEMS, REAL THING: POP CULTURE POEMS. She teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is the editor of WORD OF MOUTH: POEMS FEATURED ON NPR'S "ALL THINGS CONSIDERED", an anthology of poems by poets she has reviewed and featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

I Want to Be Your Shoebox

Memphis Minnie’s classic blues line “I want to be your chauffer” was miscopied in an early Folkways recording song transcription as “I want to be your shoebox.”

I want to be your shoebox

I want to be your Fort Knox

I want to be your equinox

I want to be your paradox

I want to be your pair of socks

I want to be your paradise

I want to be your pack of lies

I want to be your snake eyes

I want to be your Mac with fries

I want to be your moonlit estuary

I want to be your day missing in February

I want to be your floating dock dairy

I want to be your pocket handkerchief

I want to be your mischief

I want to be your slow pitch

I want to be your fable without a moral

Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel

Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l'oeil

(continued, new stanza)

I want to be your biscuits

I want to be your business

I want to be your beeswax

I want to be your milk money

I want to be your Texas Apiary honey

I want to be your Texas. Honey

I want to be your cheap hotel

I want to be your lipstick by Chanel

I want to be your secret passage

All written in Braille. I want to be

All the words you can't spell

I want to be your International

House of Pancakes. I want to be your reel after reel

Of rough takes. I want to be your Ouija board

I want to be your slum-lord. Hell

I want to be your made-to-order smorgasbord

I want to be your autobahn

I want to be your Audubon

I want to be your Chinese bug radical

I want to be your brand new set of radials

I want to be your old-time radio

I want to be your pro and your con

I want to be your Sunday morning ritual

(Demons be gone!) Your constitutional

Your habitual—

I want to be your Tinkertoy

Man, I want to be your best boy

I want to be your chauffeur

I want to be your chauf-

feur, your shofar, I want to be your go for

Your go far, your offer, your counter-offer

your two-by-four

I want to be your out and in door

I want to be your song: daily, nocturnal—

I want to be your knightingale

I want to be your dog's tail

SPICE NIGHT

It was your best friend's birthday, 9:00 and late July. By the time

I got there wearing shorts and a T-shirt everyone was pretty spiced

on Corona and Lite. What's-his-name Ramirez started telling jokes

about German Shepherds and Girl Scouts and then someone hurt a knee

trying to somersault and play volleyball with only the light of the moon

and oh yeah Joe Herder drove his '64 Cadillac right over the grass.

I think you had a date but you were sitting with me on the grass

and I didn't feel guilty, in fact I was worrying about the time

because the night would end soon and I had come just to see you. The moon

was drenching the Balcones Fault Flood Basin with a pollen, a spice,

it happens every twelve years, and that's when you put your hand on my knee

and that's when Ramirez started telling a series of dead baby jokes.

Even Joe Herder and his crowd were getting tired of the bad jokes

because they started telling stories about smuggling heroin and grass

up from Mexico and I looked down and your hand was still on my knee

and they were talking about gunrunning, Mayan treasures, and doing time,

and the Hilton in downtown San Salvador as if they were modern day spice

pirates instead of Alamo Heights kids who had been given the moon

and suddenly the sky had changed and I realized that the moon

was using its comic sensibility to fool around, to make a joke,

just by being round and fat, it played up, it complemented the spice

of the lawn, a punchy waltz with the blunt edges of the grass,

without really thinking we were moving our toes, our teeth, in time.

This is when I decided to put my hand on your knee.

So there we were in the yard with our hands on each other's knees,

watching the party, watching the crowd, and of course the moon.

I was tired but didn't want to leave so I asked you about the time

your high school class went camping at Big Bend and you made a joke

about people who ask a lot of questions and then we left the grass

and went into Mrs. Schue's house and down the hall where there was a spice

cabinet filled with, what else, hundreds of unlabeled jars of spices.

We opened all the bottles and played a game, our sweaty knees

shining in the dark. I guessed caraway, tarragon, and lemon grass;

you guessed others as we closed our eyes and inhaled the bottled moons.

Outside the volleyball game continued and the jokes.

We knew we had found that spice cabinet just in time.

Knees. Spice. Jokes. Moon. Grass. Time. Forever and ever. Amen.

NO SORRY

Do you have any scissors I could borrow? No, I’m sorry I don’t. What about a knife? Do you have any knives? A good paring knife would do or a simple butcher knife or maybe a cleaver? No, sorry all I have is this old bread knife my grandfather used to butter his bread with every morning. Well then, how about a hand drill or a hammer, a bike chain, or some barbed wire? You got any rusty razor-edged barbed wire? You got a chain saw? No sorry I don’t. Well then maybe you have some sticks? I’m sorry, I don’t have any sticks. How about some stones? No I don’t have any sticks or stones. Well how about a stone tied to a stick? You mean a club? Yeah a club. You got a club? No, sorry, I don’t have any clubs. What about some fighting picks, war axes, military forks, or tomahawks? No, sorry, I don’t have any kind of war fork, axe, or tomahawk. What about a morning star? A morning Star? Yeah, you know, those spiked ball and chains they sell for riot control. No, nothing like that. Sorry. Now, I know you said you don’t have a knife except for that dull old thing your grandfather used to butter his bread with every morning and he passed down to you but I thought maybe you just might have an Australian dagger with a quartz blade and a wood handle, or a bone dagger, or a Bowie, you know it doesn’t hurt to ask? O perhaps one of those lethal multipurpose stilettos? No, sorry. Or maybe you have a simple blow pipe? Or a complex airgun? No, I don’t have a simple blow pipe or a complex airgun. Well then maybe you have a jungle carbine, a Colt, a revolver, a Ruger, an axis bolt-action repeating rifle with telescopic sight for sniping, a sawed-off shotgun? Or better yet, a gas-operated self-loading fully automatic assault weapon? No, sorry I don’t. How about a hand grenade? No. How about a tank? No. Shrapnel? No. Napalm? No. Napalm 2? No, sorry I don’t. Let me ask you this. Do you have any inter-Continental ballistic missiles? Or submarine-Launched cruise missiles? Or Multiple independently targeted reentry missiles? Or terminally guided anti-tank shells or projectiles? Let me ask you this. Do you have any fission bombs or hydrogen bombs? Do you have any thermonuclear warheads? Got any electronic measures or electronic counter-measures or electronic counter-counter-measures? Got any biological weapons or germ warfare, preferably in aerosol form? Got any enhanced tactical neutron lasers emitting massive doses of whole-body gamma radiation? Wait a minute. Got any plutonium? Got any chemical agency, nerve agents, blister agents, you know, like mustard gas, any choking agents or incapacitating agents or toxin agents? Well I’m not sure. What do they looklike? Liquid vapor powder colorless gas. Invisible. I’m not sure. What do they smell like? They smell like fruit, garlic, fish or soap, new-mown hay, apple blossoms, or like those little green peppers that your grandfather probably would tend to in his garden every morning after he buttered his bread with that old bread knife that he passed down to you.

SYLVIA’S MOUTHS

That mouth made to do violence on,

The straight mouth, mouth’s instant flare,

Cave-mouth, mouth skewered on a groan,

Mother, you are the one mouth,

All-mouth licks, frog-mouth, fish-mouth,

I fly through the candle’s mouth, the straight mouth,

Mouth opens clean as a cat’s. Mouth-hole or eye-hole,

I draw on the old mouth, mouth full of pearls,

But mouth’s raw wounds, cupped quick to mouth,

Mouth-plugs, mouth hole crying their location,

gold mouths cry, gleaming with mouths of the corpses.

A garden of mouthing, I am all mouth,.