For Suzanne’s webpage and information on In Danger Feature on LA Poetry Festival ______ “The Man Who Delivers My Paper,” “Shangri-la,” “Death Rings Marilyn Monroe” are from In Danger copyright 1999 Suzanne Lummis. All rights reserved. ______ For more Poets

Suzanne Lummis Tamoxifen, the Side-Effect How does the thin-furred doe, fox, how does the cougar run in the night chill — sting in the air, cold banking in from the east, East Wind, massive female moon lighting the frost-tipped leaves? I have always wondered. Fellow insomniac, Newton cat, sits on the porch keeping his eye on the road, that marbley eye. His face wears a comfortable look. Why isn’t he cold? I am, was, always, since my youth, my extreme youth, that shadowy tunnel through snow leading from the lodge door up, to the surface of the knowable world. Years later, “Oh it’s part of my ensemble,” I’d say, when the host asked for my coat. I have not changed but The Change has come on me: tropical blood storm, blanket of furred heat rising from the skin. So this late, sixty degrees and falling, I rise from the kitchen table, throw open the door and leave you, not forever — though the night hits me like deep water I’ve dropped suddenly into and find I can breathe. I’m no romantic. I never believed in a knowledge borne only by women till now. In the body’s last ungovernable flaring up before scorching out, I walk for blocks and the dark stays big enough to cool off in, and the sky with its burden of deep space, its chilly secret of the infinite. Back home you turn under the bulb light as if unpuzzling the puzzled air, man who knows all the right questions. I am the answer to one of them, an answer like a house burning down. Cold pavement, cold mauve-tinted air. I know how the ferret can slip over frozen ground, and the wolverine and the wolverine’s prey, mid winter, mid two a.m. hour, in the far hills, stark outskirt of fields. Head of No Hair By accident it fell, got bumped, from the back trunk as the spaceship left, an extra one worn for less- than-special occasions — the informal head. Beached here it’s alien now, even to itself. But in fact, that’s not true, just something it made up. Really, it’s one of you, but must get into costume, a wig or a hat, to seem human. There’s a push on to keep it alive, with its curious brain; now look what happened. If it spots itself in a mirror it gets bothered, pissed off, so it’s careful to not. Well it knows it’s not pretty, not normal, more poet than woman. Oh well then, be that way, it says, so what — more and more like a thing some seeker of grails might find one night on a stony heath, this vessel locked and sealed between naked ears. He’d peer, wouldn’t he, raise it to the light, but oh such far-off light from that other one: the stark, uncared for head of the moon. Short Poem Demanding Massive Social Action I wake up, my cold is gone. Already my cats are darting about with polite expressions on their faces, pursuing their humble lives. The wine glasses from last night’s party rise from here, there, a sort of shimmering in the room like the presence of imagination. Someone built these castles in the air then couldn’t break the spell. Something hums with desire and possibility. People, why keep blaming the world when the world is this full? Fling open your windows. Throw out the old way of thinking. The Man Who Delivers My Paper In the half light, while one world is tearing away from another, he comes down the hall, laboriously, as if knee-deep in water. He leaves at my door the one gift he can give: the weather, stock reports, the death of a stranger, a child tossed into the rapids, assassins, rumors, rumblings in Santiago, a woman who had one too many, a man who missed by a hair. He sets it down gently as if it were a newborn or a thing he made with his hands like a bomb. Something passes over my dreams dropping its shadow. He goes with a lighter step than before. It’s as if he’s clearing his conscience. With each paper he leaves he grows sweeter, more pure. When I open the door there it is — indisputably mine. I could nudge it with my foot to another door, but what good would that do? One way or the other news keeps reaching me. I could shut myself in, but my phone would never stop ringing. Voices would whisper their secrets, their guilty desires. So I take it in my hands, unstring and read it, my catalog of last night’s crimes. You see? Just when you think you’ve lost the last of your innocence, you lose more. Shangri-la In New York they think all of California is like L.A. And they think everyone in L.A. has a maid. And they don’t believe you if you try to tell them. – Radio talk show caller It’s true, here we are all blonde, even in the dark, on Mondays or in slow traffic. Even in our off-guard moments, startled by a passer-by, we are young. Here we are all privileged, even in our sleep. At night the maids hover like sweetly tranquilized angels over the glazed or enameled surface of things, purring clean clean. . . It’s all true. We girls sip lemon lime through a straw, make love, Revlon our nails. We take our long sleek legs out for a walk, let them catch light. When someone snaps, “Get real!“ it hurts us, actual pain like we’ve seen in the news. So we throw beach robes over our tans, and cruise down the boulevard tossing Lifesavers into our mouths, car radios singing am. New York, is it true that in the rest of the world it is winter? Our state is a mosaic of blue pools even the Mojave, and the palm trees line up straight to the Sierra Nevadas. And the surf comes down slow like delirious laundry, even near Fresno. New York, is it true that great cold makes the bones ache as if broken? We’re sorry we can’t be reached by plane or bus, sorry one can’t pull even the tiniest thing out of a dream. We’re like the landscape inside a plastic dome filled with water. But turn us over, then upright. See? No snow falls. Death Rings Marilyn Monroe – On initial reports that she was found clutching a phone receiver He was like all the others, a heavy breather, but when he called nothing rang. She touched the receiver to her ear and hear something like hold me or let go. She thought of telephone lines crossing the city to the bruised back streets where litter drifts on the pavement, old men shuffle to bed in fourth class hotels. She imagined the last bar closed, the drunks snoring in their only shoes, but one man pressed into a phone booth. The night struck him like a fork musicians use but he makes no sound now, dangling from this wire to a star. She imagined her body sunk towards sleep, ***** the mystery of an unhooked phone, the way ***** it purrs. Then she noticed her own phone. Now, all ten numbers read zero. Baring a satin sheet she lay down, the dark mouth at her ear — her way out, his way in.