325/365 Randy C.

Mud-pasted boots, brown as barn straw
blue jeans dirtier than my mother's rags

two plaid shirts: cotton for coolness, wool for warmth
crusty-gray smudges under each ear

tangled black hair, shaved up back, flopped bangs front
over watery-blue eyes

First grade: your smell, I learned, was
the deep reek of poverty

324/365 Ken

Egg-eyed "boyfriend"
for about three minutes,
balded like your dad

Junior-high double "dates"
my first love (your best friend)
my best friend (your first wife)

Flat cokes, popcorn at the Lesdan
to keep them company

easily breaking up when
her boyfriend moved

you stepped in: place-holder,
too-early father, faithless
ne-er-do-well charmer

323/365 Mary Ann

Knitted yellow poncho, I recognized, was 

New for first-year at The College of ~ 

Excited to be "in the cities" on your own 

Where all the cool kids 

Played Simon and Garfunkle, ate Carbone's, and drank. 

Another small-town girl, brown-eyed roommate, we 

Managed to cohabitate yet not become friends

321/365 Donna B

Shaped like a tea cozy
pince-nezed in nifty tortiseshell
tutored students officially and colleagues unofficially

Still work at Metro
and live in girlhood homestead
eating every dinner with Mother and the cats

Nearly five angry feet of
the university's steadfast team, thorning
the side of Administrative Follies and Initiatives

320/365 Rosella

Stringence:
posture tilted back
spine thrust up
like Julia Child's
helmeted with
bronze-silver wig
curled into meringue,
untouchable

Insistence:
dress correctly to
cook correctly, girls only
in skirts

Resistence:
I kept apron-drawer
culottes, changing from jeans,
saying to your averted gaze,
"There. Now I won't
cook like a boy."

319/365 Dewey

Raggedy Dutch-boy bangs
gray-pink cheeks
you chucked crabapples
hard, your two trees
for the whole neighborhood

Fighting on the tire swing, your
cut-offs yanked down, faded-denim
cheeks, exposed -- I ran

home but came back to finish
our "haunted house": blindfold
neighbor kids feeling jello
brains, spaghetti intestines,
peeled-green-grape eyeballs

318/365 Angie B

Adult student with authority issues, prodigious intelligence,
unemployed spouse, three rascally children, full-time job, a secret:

under blond-bleach hair, temple-high and hidden,
faint trace of electrodes, instrumental for your health, therapy
as shocking in its effectiveness as it was for me to read about

Composition One: unity achieved successfully

317/365 Sandy

Tall, tanned, younger than I, neighbor whose eyeglasses
thickened black-lashed blues, making direct eye-contact
rare and fragmented. Only daughter, loud laugher, frequent
visitor that summer of breath-blown plastic pool, pink
two-pieces with tired elastic, splashing heavily as a boy,
running home to the scratch-voiced bark of a house-bound mother.