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A private public space

By Bob Hicok b. 1960 Bob Hicok

You can’t trust lesbians. You invite them

to your party and they don’t come,

they’re too busy tending vaginal

flowers, hating football, walking their golden

and chocolate labs. X gave me a poem

in which she was in love with a woman

and the church but the church

couldn’t accept four breasts in one bed.

When I asked if our coworkers knew,

she dropped her head and I said nothing

for years until this morning I realized

no one reads poems: my secrets and hers

are safe in verse. I knew she’d have enjoyed

the Beaujolais and I want to meet Dianne,

Mona Lisa, Betty, Alice,

the name’s been changed

to protect women who can’t stand in a room

holding hands because you can’t trust

heterosexuals to love love, however

it comes. So I recorded

the party for her, for them, the mic

a bit away from the action

to catch the feel of waves touching shore

and letting go, the wash of moods

across the hours of drink and yes, some grapes

were thrown and I breathed

the quickening revelation

of a cigarette, someone said “I gave up

underwear for Lent” and I hope

they play the tape while making love.

As if finally the world’s made happy

by who they are, laughing with, not at

the nipple lick clit kiss hug

in bed and after, the on and on

of meals and moons and bills

and burning days of pretending

they don’t exist. “Who’s she? Just

a friend.” And oceans are merely dew

upon the land.

Source: Poetry (October 2010).

Biography

Bob Hicok was born in 1960 in Michigan and worked for many years in the automotive die industry. A published poet long before he earned his MFA, Hicok is the author of several collections of poems, including The Legend of Light, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry in 1995 and named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year; Plus Shipping (1998); Animal Soul (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; . . .

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