Poetry – Issue 2 | December 2008
Three Poems by Tim Hawkins
Overdue Rant
My landlady has the gift of second sight and likes to talk politics.
She tells me that Reagan saved Central America
from communism, then she raves about the dead Vietnamese
while extolling Somoza’s reforms. She cooks herself
six meals a day and offers me moldy grapes.
When her pots and pans have gathered flies for six days
she curses the sick maid and reminds me to wash my plate.
Jesus made her invisible on a bus ride through El Salvador
where she had gone to tidy her late brother’s affairs.
He died of a broken appendix;
hoarding toilet paper did him no good.
I have rationed my rice, and when I’m hungry it is gone.
She keeps fish heads in the refrigerator for the cat.
My eggs smell like fish heads, my cheese smells like fish heads,
my rice smells like fish heads and is gone.
She has invited me to a gathering of sober Americans abroad
on my day off.
She was a starving actress in the sixties,
and is now a painter of some reputation.
She holds her new grandson close to her breast
while his father raises his voice.
She was beautiful then, and I believe her.
Now she holds her grandson close to her breast like a ham.
She had a Hollywood contract and filmed half a picture.
She was raven-haired and played the part of Rebecca.
The Actor’s Studio was so taken with her suicide
she was auctioned off like a side of beef.
In a fit of pride she returned to Costa Rica
and became a landlady.
She is a good landlady, although she sometimes forgets
to properly store her perishables.
She has only burned the house down once.
Some producer was coming down to fetch her on his yacht.
He was taken with her innocence, but liked to call her “grandma,”
since she was all of twenty-two.
He set sail from Miami with a crew of six,
ranging in age from thirteen to fourteen,
and inevitably died of a heart attack.
The panic-stricken girls left his body to rot on deck,
afraid they’d be accused of murder
if they nudged his stiff corpse over the side
with their still-growing feet.
For days they subsisted on brandy and cigars,
drifting in an aimless frenzy along the Gulf Stream,
a feast of gulls pounding the cabin door…
You never told me how it ended, though
it is safe to assume they were rescued, I suppose.
Forgive me now for this intrusion.
I have just now come upon this after all these years;
I believe I wrote it the first time my rent was late
when I hardly knew you at all,
before I learned Spanish on the tape recorder and
your voice had become to me
the breathless epiphanies of Lorca and Neruda.
I finish it now ten years down the line,
many years since I have lost the tapes
and a long time since I was your friend.
About the author
Tim Hawkins has lived and traveled widely throughout the U.S., Southeast Asia and Central America. He has worked as a journalist, technical writer, a teacher in international schools, and once, memorably, as a nose-hair clipper model. He returned to the U.S. in 2005 after living abroad for thirteen years, and currently lives in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. His work has recently appeared in Umbrella Journal and The Shit Creek Review.
