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Janie Breggin Braverman, a poet and fiction writer, lives with her husband in Iowa City, IA. She is a recent transplant from Denver, CO, and sometimes misses the mild winters and the dry mountain air. When not writing, she can be found in the garden, playing duplicate bridge or missing her children who live in Denver, Colorado Springs and Santa Barbara, CA.
Janie Breggin Braverman
Spaghetti Soup
I sling spaghetti soup at the diner,
south of the highway,
where the intergalactic cowboys come
to let down their hair and tentacles.
The cake had broken out of more jails
than the number of men’s beds I’ve warmed,
had broken out into a brighter rash than any
of the women I’ve ever loved,
and still had time to break in a pair
of bright red, hand tooled, ostrich skin
cockroach crushers.
The squash began
to rail, rail against the unfairness of it all.
It was hard enough to be an adolescent
without knowing you were going to end
up in someone’s stir-fry.