Jane Flanders   AUNTS (THE BEST KIND) Aunts are like your mother but not too much. They don't know how to scold you or wish you would leave them alone. They never marry; devote themselves like nuns to your well-being. Aunts travel to places mothers never heard of and bring you things--not underwear or mittens-- but cedar boxes from Bermuda, pin cushions from Chinatown, jewelry from the Five & Ten. They smell of sachet and spearmint. Aunts have lives or their own (must have) but you'd never know it. When they arrive they hug you first, swooping down like swans, leaving red marks all over your face. They laugh and tell you how big you are getting. When you grow up you visit them with your children. This is a test. They are kind but disinterested. While you were gone they got thin or fat. It is just as you thought. You were the one. There was nobody else.     POET IN RESIDENCE That's right, I live here In the brick house with the weedy yard; Sometimes it rains And sometimes it's just the starlings Taking a bath in the clogged gutter, Their comings and goings Scatter brief shade. In warm weather Legions of children pass this way, Waving their standards-- Water, sun, fresh fruit. They suck the pulp and spit away the seeds, They beat their sand buckets with shovels To scare away the birds, My desk is in the hall. I'd never get anything done Without that little room at the Back of my head.     COUPLING Fish do it best, never touching; While she blurts out pearls He hovers above her In a cloud of his own making. Bees mate in mid-flight; The queen flies, Not in ecstasy but panic, The drone falters and drops. While the male mantis is still Kicking like a piston, Filling his love at one end, She eats his head at the other. Leave it to the larger beasts, Dogs, apes, elephants, To make a joke of it, A mutt jigging hotly Over the haunches of some Bored, delinquent thoroughbred, The baggy skin of elephants Swaying sadly in midthrust, Monkeys, waving their red, Tumescent bottoms, And man most of all, Aiming his little homo erectus At the stars. Desire can jiggle his shackles Any time, he can Wake from a dream Clutching his pillow, He can be swimming or Reading an article on foreign Policy, he can be caught At a dinner party by the Practiced hand of his hostess Under the table. Abruptly, she excuses herself. Soon he follows, Shielding himself with a napkin, Up the polished stairs Into her scented room. Between the salad and the Camembert They manage an extra course, Her arms and legs unsheathed, His pants carefully hung Over a chair to save the crease. He mounts hastily, One ear cocked to the crowd below, A clown astride his donkey; She kicks and bucks, Seeing satyrs rampant in the corn.   STRANGE FRUITS We all have tales to tell, How the womb jerked and we were rejected, How our defenses have been assaulted, Our love exceeded our abilities. We wear clustered around our throats The soul's artifacts. We have watched the sun come up, We have gathered the field's flowers, We have built towers and great walls, We have grown impatient in the dark garden. We have plucked out our brothers' eyes And smothered our children, We have cut off our hands and sold them To art dealers, they are on display somewhere In little glass-doored refrigerators, We have wept over trivialities, We have failed, in the confusion, To take our own lives, The dead have gone home without us. Out of the plane's wreckage we creep like maggots, The ship sinks but we make it, somehow, To an island in suburbia. In Venice we escape the plague, In Alexandria survive the famine, We are on the road to Mecca and Canterbury, An angel has passed over us. We could amuse you for a thousand and one nights With stories of how we fell into plum pudding And made the princess laugh And burned our feet in the fire. We are all old wives, even the youngest of us, Spreading our table before you.     I NEVER LET IT BOTHER ME I never let it bother me, your not loving me, or rather if it bothered me, your not loving me, I'd buy myself some flowers (anemones, I think--they sound so nice-- or lilies, for virtue), I'd do a load of dirty clothes, or run around the block in my bright orange shorts, or rather, when it bothers me, your not loving me, I bake cookies for the kids, or cry, or sing myself a song, soft-shoeing it into the dining room like that bear at the zoo who lumbers around with his mouth open, who can't tell popcorn from little wads of paper, who doesn't know love from trouble, that's what I do when it bothers me, which is only when my heart beats, only while my toenails grow, only so long as I'm sleeping or awake, anyway, that's how things get done in this world, which is why I never let it bother me.     WHY I GOT PREGNANT I thought I liked babies. I wanted a new wardrobe. I wanted a new name: Mama. I was curious. I was careless. Mother did it when she was young. I wanted attention. I wanted to please Aunt Evie, who loves kids. I wanted to know how a watermelon felt. I was bored. I wanted to quit my job. I wanted to relive my childhood. I thought it would be good for my complexion. I, myself, was such an adorable baby. I couldn't think of anything to give my husband for his birthday. I really wanted a cat but he's allergic to them.       Jane Flanders is the author of four books of poems: Leaving and Coming Back (Quarterly Review of Literature, 1980), The Students of Snow (University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), Timepiece (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988) and Sudden Plenty (The Bunny and the Crocodile Press, 2003). At her death on April 12, 2001, Flanders left almost 700 uncollected poems, most unpublished as well. This huge body of work was progressively uncovered in the nine months after her death by her husband Steven. Most of those selected for Sudden Plenty were written between 1974 and 1978. Steven Flanders calls these "the dramatic years when she discovered her mature voice and vocation as a poet" and credits the "inspiration, support and encouragement" of Grace Cavalieri, Flanders's teacher at a workshop at the Glen Echo Writers' Center, for allowing her to "transform her relation to her art from that of an occasional versifier to that of a poet by vocation." Published in Volume 5, Number 2, Spring 2004.