Honorable Mention

This year I won an honorable mention for poetry from the Mills English Dept writing contest. That, was cool. Here's one of the poems I entered:

Cruella Deville
always lurched her long gray car, parking sideways on the un-mown scorch in her yard, until the night she ran over my bicycle, the long wrinkled car a menacing finger pointing, the headlights two crazed eyes staring through the walls, pounding her drunken fists and scream-crying, ‘Let me in my house!’ We huddled in our pajamas against our pure cotton mother who always smelled of lilacs and yellow, and when my father opened the door, a shaft of light tumbled out and broke into a hundred tiny pieces on the porch.

I saw her cracked, ochre teeth, the red mercurochrome eyes like the time I skinned both knees, smelled grape vinegar leaking from the ends of her wild, sizzling hair. My dad stepped easily over the broken shards into the darkness, his voice warm music just like Pastor Shane’s on Sundays, to gentle Mrs.Deville across the imaginary line between our yards, the one my brothers dared to cross, press their virgin freckles against the dirty plate glass window, see if Satan owned a color television.

Morning and I slide onto the banana seat, ‘good as new’ my dad says, close my hands around the rubber grips and push off, picking up speed, the pink and white plastic tassels and long flying hair, but it never rode straight after that.

The front tire always wobbled
just a little.