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.................................
The Red Garter
.................................When I was a
Little girl
I hung out in
Bars
Like the men.
Grampa took me
To the Silver Room
And sat me on a red leather
And chrome
Chair
Next to him,
And I
Wore that blue dress
With the layers of ruffles
And a wide sash around my
Tiny girl waist.
My legs and arms
Stick-thin
Hanging out from under those
Powder blue ruffles,
Long black indian hair
And big eyes staring from under
Bangs.
Swimming in bliss,
In his pride of me,
I sipped a Shirley Temple.
"Sing", Grampa said, and
I sang.But Daddy took me to the
Red Garter,
Where the Indians could go drink
Because it was not
Really in town.
I sat on the bar and
Picked at peanuts
And the smells and sounds
Stunned me into
Wide-eyed silence.
I thought those ladies
Were so pretty
In their dresses and
Heels, makeup smeared as the
Evening wore.
Sometimes when the
Fights started
Daddy remembered to take me to the car,
But often I
Watched,
Thinking how I would handle it
If I were that
Big Indian man,
And not a
Little scrap
In torn jeans,
Stained t shirt
And beads.
.................................
I Belong
.................................I said I belonged there too,
But they didn't believe me,
Those full-blood kids
Their black hair standing on their heads in spikes,
Their dark wide faces
With furious black eyes.
"Go!" they said,
and then they threw apples at me.
One hit my back and burst
Splattered soft sweet meat over
My thin shoulders.
I tried to be
Invisible,
Half red
Half kike
Welcome nowhere,
And defiant
As a starving coyote.
I lived in a shotgun house
On a flat plain
And the sky went forever,
And I remember most
The winds
That whipped up
On the high desert
And took my waist-length hair,
Black and straight as it was back then,
And twisted it about my head
Like the snakes
It later became,
And I looked at my
Bone-thin hands,
Fragile, small, and
too white..................................
Hope Cregger
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Copyright © Hope Cregger
January 2002
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...a poem in this room by Jennifer Hill Kaucher...
east meets west in sun and flowers
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