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Wendy Tarleton Klein

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Havana

Wendy Tarleton Klein reading Havana 1720.2 KB
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She’s an old whore, ripe with experience
dragging her soiled petticoats,
through the moist dark.

The leather seats of her taxis are cracked
by old trysts, the fenders dented
by bodies from another time.

She side-steps around young girls
in stilettos, out late looking for work
finding it, their tawny legs

insinuated between
the thighs of men who were
weary just minutes ago,

but no longer, as their flies are
fingered, their grizzled pates stroked by
warm hands, their backs pressed tight

against rusty wrought-iron gates,
leaving a filigree imprint that
will remind them tomorrow

of rumba in Havana.
The red light of her cigarillo moves,
and with each inhalation,

flashes a tight Morse code: the sting
of the smoke, the flare of her nostrils,
more sensed than seen. She’s a lady dragon

and she’ll take them inside her hot tunnel mouth,
sear their flesh with her cinnamon tongue,
musky and wise with nicotine;

brown with the last smoke of evening,
before lying down, and the first smoke of morning,
before lying down again.

Smoke, she hums, gets in your eyes, and
sly as the rising breeze brushing bare flesh,
the palm leaves will croon the chorus.

Wendy Tarleton Klein has been published in The Jewish Quarterly, Mslexia and The River Thames in Verse. She has won prizes and commendations and was a Troubadour New Voices poet in May 2005.

Page(s) 56

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