Two Poems
90s Mom
Her jewelry always gets clumped
together in the jewelry box,
chains clutch each other,
odd earrings lodged in the links.
Jewelry boxes live in the bathroom.
Every box in every bathroom
she inhabits becomes coated in blush dust
and a general crust of makeup
that tautologically smells of her skin—
rose water and blowdryer breath.
She always carries this smell,
despite the grime between the tiles
and the black bits on the stove
and the never-laundered towels that hung
next to the scummy sink where
I would scrub myself every night
her in the mirror on the toilet
tugging at a tampon string hanging
like the chain of the bathtub drain,
a red stain creeping down from above,
she’d drop it in the toilet and flush
like the box tells you not to, and she’d wash
her hands, thoroughly, like a doctor
and inspect her pores in the mirror,
old acne pockmarks and new freckles.
Or me in the bathtub and her
wielding a new tampon, fresh cotton
like clean bedsheets, telling me about
how big her breasts had been before I was born
while soap bubbles popped on my flat form
and I failed to imagine a world
without me observing it, without
my hair fanning out on the bath-surface
like a storm over my body, without blood
gurgling up making the toilet water pink,
without the nightly conference of these rituals
sometimes by 99 cent candlelight, naked
among the waterbugs and leaks of our apartment.
Night Drive
on the road the houses are
lemon-filled and cedar-crusted
I could be inside one of them I could
be watching us slash through the night
while I stood in red boots
in my golden wooden hallway
my kitchen soon to be green
with the morning
coffee grounds blooming
next to chilled jam
but actually my ear
is brushing the bottom of the steering wheel
how I am humming into you
can I fold the world that way
how can I tuck myself
into the softest corner of life
your zipper winks, shining
your shirt drenched from my mouth
you moan into the windshield and take
us home
Simone Wolff is the baby of the Vanderbilt MFA poetry program, incumbent poetry editor of the Nashville Review, and social media intern at Coconut Magazine.