ONCE WONDER
By Verandah Porche
Once white Wonder Bread
built bodies eight ways
then 12 ways.
Did bread change
or did the body?
Once we pledge-allegianced
to one nation indivisible
then under G-d we slept
through reveille
without waking.
Once we spelled just
48 states with their dinky capitols
then Alaska mated with Hawaii
tricking jigsaw puzzle makers
with their size and place.
Once my late dad trekked
20 miles no 25
in street shoes
through a mythical blizzard
to get home to us!
Men don't come like that
any more my mother swore.
Once my brother took me
to sample cherrystone clams
a dozen raw and salted dashed
with Tabasco. I let him be
the suitor-savior to shell out for.
Once Wonder was a pliant slice
tabula rasa in a wrapper
then the sums ballooned.
No wonder
who's red-handed
and true-blue.
Verandah Porche, itinerant poet (The Body's Symmetry, Glancing Off) and performer has been featured in the Burlington Free Press, the Sunday Boston Globe, and on NPR's ARTBEAT. She has read at such sites as Harvard College, the Rutland Jail, and the Palace of Friendship in the former Leningrad. She received the Vermont Arts Council's 1998 Award of Merit for her work.
In 2002, Porche canvassed Hartford's Parkville neighborhood as Real Art Ways' Poet-in-Residence. She collected interviews with community members and transformed then into "told poems." Porche has interviewed life-long Parkville residents, Park Street store owners, seniors at the Senior Center, landlords and literacy volunteers, and many others as hands-on research into the pulse of Parkville. Copies of Listening Out Loud: A Hundred Days in Parkville by Verandah Porche are available at Real Art Ways.
Porche was a cofounder of Liberation News Service (LNS) with Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom. Their adventures together were chronicled in two books by Mungo: Famous Long Ago, and Total Loss Farm.
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