Betty Perkins (1930–2015)
I visited once,
and all I could do was
swat at crosshatches
of dandelion fluff in the air
and draw a map of the old fairgrounds
in my head: Where are you? Are you
at the tilt-a-whirl? The scrambler?
In line to see the dog-faced boy?
My mother, the woman
who told me, If you ever
find a Diane Von Furstenburg
wrap dress, buy it,
lying in the same ground
that held the hoochie coochie
stripper tent when I was a kid,
her peach-powder eyelids gawking up
the shimmy-fringe skirts
of Lottie the Body and the Queen
of Muscle Control. My mother
and every Presbyterian William and Dottie,
buried in starched collars and taupe
suit skirts, every mouth opening,
“Oh,” as the hawker slits the tent
to the hermaphroditic goat.
If she had beheld, like my brothers
(a secret I never told),
the woman who could crush a tin can
between her breasts,
would she have looked away
or nodded with a reverence
reserved for the Doxology?
She is why I cross at
the ankle, not the knee,
why all beds need a dust ruffle,
why my father’s dirty jokes
never made it to the punchline,
and why this poem has one.
O, grief, let me have this one.