Episode 22: Tea Leaves and Tastykake

For this episode, we look at three poems by Laura Sobbott Ross. She’s taught English to students from dozens of countries, and has two poetry chapbooks: A Tiny Hunger (YellowJacket Press) and My Mississippi (Anchor & Plume Press.) For this episode, we look at three poems by Laura Sobbott Ross. Laura Sobbott Ross lives in a rural, hilly part of inland Florida where horses and hothouses of orchids abound. She loves to take pictures on long drives through the open land, and to sing to the radio with the windows wide, which conjures threats from her teenagers, but her dogs don’t seem to mind. You will find paint on her clothes at any given time. She’s taught English to students from dozens of countries, and has two poetry chapbooks: A Tiny Hunger (YellowJacket Press) and My Mississippi (Anchor & Plume Press.) First, we’re transported to the sunny beaches of “Bora Bora,” where we find ourselves with some trouble in paradise. We follow that off trying to decipher “The Walrus in the Tea Leaves,” where we’re left with more questions than answers. And finally, we throwback to The Eagles’ “Hotel California” with “Déjà Vu.” Even though we do check in, we’re not so sure if we ever want to leave! Let us know what you think of these poems on Facebook and Twitter with #squeegeeboy! Don’t forget to read on!   Present at the Editorial Table: Kathleen Volk Miller Marion Wrenn Tim Fitts Sara Aykit   Production Engineer: Joe Zang   PBQ Box Score: 3=0 -------------------------    Bora Bora     1996 A shaft of blue splintered into a thousand nuances, shed them into the sea beneath our tiki hut— wedged on stilts into hunger clouds of shimmery fish, oysters lipping black pearls. We married there, on the shore between the neon chakra of sky & water, a handful of drowsy natives shaking New Year’s Eve from the folds of their pareos. Dancing, a tide etched in sand. Later, petal-strung in whites already sighing into sepia, from our balcony we sought those old stars from home. Palm trees swaying festively in dark silhouette across the unadorned horizon of the Pacific. Love, a sugared rim we shared in sips, cowry shells strung and whispering at our throats, every edge garnished in hibiscus, sunburn, pineapple. In the shallows, the moray eel we’d spotted earlier— prehistoric face bobbling from his pulpit of stone. Before the ceremony, we’d tossed in our pockets of foreign coins— wishes aimed at his blind scowl. Later, moonlight uprooted the slippery ribbon of his tail, while the current floated him, floorboard by floorboard, across you & me; a benediction in a sleeve of sea water, the round polyp mouths of the reef opening in the dark like a choir.   The Walrus in the Tea Leaves   For Doug Darling, it wasn’t the news you’d expected. And when you told me about it, I’d giggled, conjured images of broken symmetries— kaleidoscope and compass, magnetic poles and mirrors gone random. I knew what you were hoping for, how you’d tilted your throat back and swallowed down the void. The psychic parsing through the wrack line for messages left in seaweedy clots of Chamomile or Earl Gray. Speckle and flack— dark nebula splat against a bone-colored sky. You said she’d seemed baffled by the walrus— awkward animal, all teeth and tail. You told me he’d risen twice from the wet ashes that morning, buoyant and robust in his island cup, nosing through the diorama of dregs like a seafloor of mollusk shells pursed shut; his mouth, an insistent imprint on the rim.     Déjà Vu     —1979 There has to be darkness and a highway. Beyond the shoulders of the road, a topography, splayed and lit in street lamps. You’re seventeen, and Hotel California is playing on the radio. If you look close enough, you can see the silhouette of mountains beyond your own reflection in the car window. To the right, an anchor store in a strip mall. To the left, the gas station where high school boys work— the good looking ones who sweep the silk of their long bangs from their eyes with puppy-soft hands, and ask if you want regular or unleaded. Watching them comb your windshield clean beneath the squeegee’s wide, forgiving blade, you might imagine whispering: Save me, and wonder, does anyone do that anymore?— the windshield washing, you mean, of course, and you know that if you slid your fingers inside the thick baffles of their goose-down vests, down into the warmth beneath their soft-as-ash flannel shirts, your palms would smell like gasoline and their father’s Old Spice, and that in the star bristled night, every imagined kiss was a curfew, exquisitely unfair, and a promise you had made in a fever to return home what you’d borrowed just the way you found it.