microphone and podium





Summer 2007, Volume 3

Poetry by Tamara Trujillo

Famous Potatoes

Even now,
when hearing Idaho mentioned
I think of you, farm boy,
cold and asleep in potato fields
loving earth.

And I’m thinking how I asked for your hands
made them search me,
and how your breath on my lips made the room spin and how
if it was a good night
which it always was with you,
you’d whisper my name.

And I’m thinking how Susan, at my barbeque,
said we were like one raging fire,
as we wrestled that night in our t-shirts and jeans,
wishing we were alone.

And I remember your hands, your freckled shoulders,
your mouth.
friends still ask why you are so hard to forget
and I just smile Idaho, Idaho.


For Matthew

Nothing more than the buckle of a pant leg, a shadowed silhouette,
never were you the dust of razor stubble against porcelain or lump of abandoned bed pillow.
Instead you were a smoky ghost woven from imagination, recollection, intention, hope
echoing from across the desert
forever a phone call away.

Remembering the sharp cut of your jaw, the meaty fingertips, I could dream
the long, bare waist, the thin cotton slipping down the narrow hip.
How perfect to be always perfect.
And the sound of those cowboy boots (ridiculous in the Arizona heat), the stiffness of your ash-blonde curls in my fist were merely a letter I wrote
to myself in the urgency of summer, a phony companion, a cruel, hot joke.

Now you are a row of black letters in standard font,
ever and only
an outline of a man.



BIO:  Tamara Trujillo has been an English instructor at Fullerton College since 1997, before which time she taught English for one year, full-time at a community college in Chandler, Arizona and for two years at a Catholic high school in Los Angeles. A former editor of her college literary magazine, Tamara began writing at a young age but did not seriously pursue her interest in the craft until after graduation from college. She has kept a journal since she was 14 and rereads entries when she wants a good laugh or needs to remind herself of the virtue of humility.



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