by Rebecca Aronson

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

I used to hip-check the jukebox
when I passed it if I didn’t like the song playing;
the music would veer and skip where my curve met
the rounded corner of neon and metal. I took out Peggy Lee’s guttural whine
this way every month until they finally stopped replacing it.
I looked good in my stain-hiding brown waitress uniform,
all camber and coil, shined up with kitchen heat
and magnetic. Who wants to be reminded
magic is illusory when the dove is still flying
out of the hat with such disarming reliability?
I wanted to dance because dancing made a flame
lick at the edges of everything. Here was the secret
to living: what is dull can be polished
to a hot glow with the right friction.
What is lost can be added to the heart’s altar.
Peggy Lee wailed her faith in disappointment
but she was wrong:
even the fryer grease
which hung in the air and followed me
from work to the bar after
once made a hungry boy tell me
I smelled miraculous.

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Rebecca Aronson is the author of Anchor, forthcoming from Orison Books in October, 2022; Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize and winner of the 2019 Margaret Randall Book Award from the Albuquerque Museum Foundation; and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com.

By Rebecca Aronson

Because I never saw the butcher take down even one skinned rabbit
from the line hung in the window, I did not believe

that somewhere up the road was a crowded hutch
in which they huddled. I did not picture the soft ears

laid flat while a hand groped into the straw-dusted recesses.
Nor did I as I might expect allow the image of steam rising from a shallow white bowl

or those slim flanks braised on a plate with parsley sprigs and spring potatoes. I looked
at the rabbit-shaped bodies suspended on silver hooks

in the clear shelf of the window, the pane wiped clean I guess
each evening, and the sun bright on the glass

in which was reflected the wispy boulevard trees just now blossoming
above the passers-by, and saw across the street three blue awnings

blurred with sky, their flapping
like a flash of something disappearing fast into tall grasses.

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Rebecca Aronson is the author of Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize, and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She has poems recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume, Tishman Review, Sugarhouse Review, Baltimore Review, and others. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.