Vox Populi
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Michael Simms: Mary Jo and Aline
I want to say something but shame prevents me yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but rather you would speak about what is just ― Sappho Mornings they loved best sitting over long breakfast light slanting over them Mary Jo sharing bits of news Aline listening adoring the sounds of birdsong they were partners selling real estate in southwest Houston during the go-go years Mary Jo always said sell the house to the woman financing to the man and shy Aline in charge of paperwork a perfect team perfect partners they’d met at Baylor fell in love reading Sappho and Millay said goodbye at graduation and as they thought of it started their lives Mary Jo became a stewardess for Pan Am considered a romantic profession for a woman in those days and Aline married Dick a seminary student at Baylor After years of hiding they grew careless Aline’s husband Dick by then part-time preacher full-time slumlord caught them eating berries in bed Last time I talked with Aline we sat in Starbucks looking across the highway once a country road where Westheimer Baptist Church stood small wooden frame painted white with a simple steeple double red door a pulpit where Uncle Earl roared his sermons and Aline played the organ behind the church now gone I kissed my first girl whose name I can’t remember the church torn down years ago now national boutiques selling lipstick and bikinis Aline says far away Mary Jo was the great love of my life we would’ve done anything to stay together For the sin of love they sacrificed everything Uncle Earl shamed them from the pulpit the organ was taken from Aileen the music of prayer no longer flowed from her hands and Mary Jo lost her family even her grandchildren were taken she died asking to see them I wonder what it’s like to throw everything you have in the bonfire of no regrets and hearing my thoughts Aline says when she first saw Mary Jo she couldn’t speak as if my tongue was broken and a soft flame stole beneath my flesh
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Note: the epigraph is from Anne Carson’s translation If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2003).The last three lines are from a fragment by Sappho found on the website Cosi’s Odyssey, translator unknown.
Copyright 2022 Michael Simms. First published in Live Encounters, edited by Mark Ulyseas.
Michael Simms’s two most recent collections of poetry are American Ash and Nightjar both published by Ragged Sky Press. His novel Bicycles of the Gods is scheduled to be released in August 2022 by Madville.
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Really like this, Michael. Berries in bed an image that sustains throughout.
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Thanks, Jerry! It’s an important poem for me.
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Stunning!
Crosses so many forbidden thresholds and today, this world! Hard to peacefully place oneself in any white-steepled edifice . I am trying to be more attentive to God’s first language (which I don’t believe to be English), but perhaps silence.
Best to you this summer,
Sean
Thankyou Michael
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Thanks, Sean!
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For the sin of love they sacrificed everything.
Can’t get these words out of my head.
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Thanks, Nancy. Yes, my aunt Mary Jo was a gifted and warm-hearted woman. If she’d been born to a later generation, life would have almost certainly been easier for her.
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Thanks for this!
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… and she died asking to see her grandchildren.
It’s beautiful, Michael. And sad. Makes me regret all over things we as humans are capable of doing to people we loved just a day before. (I grew up just off Westheimer Road, by the way.)
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Neighbor! Thanks, Kim!
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Stunning Poem, Michael. This one’s a gut puncher.
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Thanks, Bob!
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Thanks, Bob!
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Beautiful. Beautiful.
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Thank you, John.
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