Soybeans

This poem is Brock-approved, which is the only reason I'm posting it. Because I don't consider myself a poet anymore, I don't feel like an asshole as posting poems as blogs. I didn't read this at Teddy's because I felt like I was dying and just read a funny poem about Vince (perhaps only funny if you know him), which I will post once I get it onto my computer.

This is for Brock, and it's called Soybeans.


Inside the pages of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row
I find one of Brock’s discarded lines:
“In the grocery aisle, the soybeans are notoriously absent.”
So loving this line that’s never found another home,
I place it in a new white box:
Facebook status.
Suddenly, friends believe I’m a poet again.
They say, only you could make grocery shopping
poetic, Brooke. Only you
could make soybeans sexy. Maybe I just needed
to see the word again next to my name: poet.
Blue name tag: Hello, My Name Is Poet.
Now, as long as I can avoid my own face in the mirror, I’m on a roll.
Now, I compose my own line: “tomato soup and grilled cheese for my sick buggy and for me.”
One more: “avocados sit glibly in their rows.”
Only…my poetic lines aren’t as poetic as his.
See how that works?
I hate the thief in my heart and the poet in my husband’s.
I take a pen to bed, hide it under the pillow: a way to weaponize love.
That last phrase I just wrote: a way to weaponize love—I stole that
from some guy on Keith Olbermann.
I don’t even know what it means.
Now Brock’s snoring—the soft kind that never wakes me up
but while awake, I can be appreciative about.
Holding fast to pen I remain vigilant:
of the air wending in and out of his mouth
when suddenly the air stops, his eyes are open,
and he ends this poem.