Barbara Hamby: Ode to Untoward Dreams
Have you ever dreamt you had sex with someone
you aren’t remotely interested in,
like a guy you work with or one of your husband’s friends
Barbara Hamby: Ode on My Wasted Youth
Other people were getting married and buying cars,
but not me, and I wasn’t even looking for Truth,
just some kind of minor grip on the whole enchilada
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Hardware Stores
Where have all the hardware stores gone—dusty, sixty-watt
warrens with wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red?
Barbara Hamby: Vex Me
Vex me, O Night, your stars stuttering like a stuck jukebox,
put a spell on me, my bones atremble at your tabernacle
of rhythm and blues.
Barbara Hamby: Mockingbird on the Buddha
The mockingbird on the Buddha says, Where’s my seed,
you Jezebel, where’s the sunshine in my blue sky,
where’s the Hittite princess, Pharaoh’s temple, where’s the rain
for the misery I love so much?
Barbara Hamby: Trigger Tries To Explain
Aw, Dale, he didn’t mean it when he said I was the
best thing that ever happened to him. If he even said it,
chalk it up to the RKO publicity machine.
Barbara Hamby: Ode on My Mother’s Handwriting
Her a’s are like small rolls warm from the oven, yeasty,
fragrant, one identical to the other, molded
by a master baker, serious about her craft, but comical, too,
smudge of flour on her sharp nose
Barbara Hamby: Hatred
Abracadabra, says Mephisto, the fire fly
buddha of Rue Morgue, and the whole wide world
changes from a stumbling rick-rack machine
doing the rag time, the bag time, the I’m-on-the
edge-of-a-drag time to a tornado of unmitigated
fury.
Barbara Hamby: The Word
In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables
like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas
Barbara Hamby: Nose
Suddenly, I feel as if I have no nose, like Gogol’s Kovelev
riding around St. Petersburg looking for his proboscis.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Red and Speedy
Who can remember all the selves stuffed into the miraculous
sack of skin?
Barbara Hamby: 17 Dollars
That’s how much the man who owned DuBey’s gave me
for my books that time you insisted
they were taking up space and we needed the money.
