Orlando 

Hide the children.  Cover the tomato plants.  Here is what I’ve been thinking about since Orlando.
 

ALFALFA SURFER
 

there is nothing
like
the scent of a man after a day in the hayfield
sweet corn
and
freshly cut grass
a teenage man
who doesn’t own a shirt

at his peak
muscles moving in places

he doesn’t know he has
tanned arms pitching bales of hay
onto the flatbed truck.
 

I am 13

learning to drive

the flatbed truck in my grandfather’s hayfields.

I bury my face
into Alfalfa Surfer’s armpit
when we get back in the
the flatbed truck.
 

The scent of a man
the underside of a man -
I rub my face against
his chest
my nose
across his forearms
 

he doesn’t stop me
from getting aroused by his body 

he doesn’t take advantage of me
Alfalfa Surfer.
 

I’m where I want to be

between a man’s arms
my ear against his chest
listening
to the sound of his heartbeat.
 

Close to the barn
Alfalfa Surfer
places my hands on the
steering wheel and lets me
back up
the flatbed truck
to the base of the
hay elevator
my grandfather
standing 

in the barn loft

yelling orders.
 

“I hate him,”
I say.
 

“He’s your granddaddy, buddy,”
Alfalfa Surfer says.
 

He opens the door and lifts me out.
 

“I swear,”
he yells up to my grandfather,
“this boy’s grown an inch this month.”
 

I
land on the ground
with a boner
not a “boy” boner either
and
I don’t bother to hide it

I am proud

to be a man

well maybe on the cusp

with a boner

for another man

in 1968.

+=+

for my husband

Luke,

my very own Alfalfa Surfer
33 years together
loving
living
laughing.

We are lucky boyz.  

I spoke on the phone tonight to one of my historical friends. His mother and my mother got into so much trouble back in the day, flying with stock car racer Curtis Turner in his private plane all over the southeast, playing golf and meeting my Dad, who was Mr. Turner’s attorney.

Billy and I go back to my earliest memories. He’s 8 years older than I am which, when we were young, seemed like a vast crevasse I could not cross because, well, he was 8 years older. But tonight on the phone the 8 year difference in our ages didn’t matter one whit.

Billy lives 3000 miles away.

Recently, several close friends of mine have suddenly vanished, left my life, my orbit, on purpose. At least I thought they were friends. I was wrong. Obviously. They vanished of their own accord, I did not want them to leave. It has hurt me to the core, mainly because I don’t like that many people so when I make a friend I always think it is forever. I believe that I am a good friend, that I was a good friend to these people.

I don’t think anything like this has ever happened to me, not even in high school, if then.

Whatever happened to talking shit through?

Billy has known me all my life. He remembers my father and mother and my sister and brother, all from the beginning. He is my historical friend. I can count on him.

And because he is not, shall we say, a self-obsessed dried up piece of petty bullshit SHIT who, well… they are not worth the effort of my anger all these many months later…

“That she forgot me was the least
I felt it second pain
That I was worthy to forget
Was most I thought upon.

Faithful was all that I could boast
But Constancy became
To her, by her innominate,
A something like a shame.”

– Emily Dickinson, 1914