RockPaperPoem

 

Mix Tape

by Nicole Borg

 

—after Barbara Crooker

 

Write me a poem about those Memorex
tapes you have stored in an old shoe box,
(first pair of Docs) a label at the top
in the high school scrawl of a boy
you liked. If you press the tape to your nose,
you will think of his lips, raspberry soft,
and the way he licked them when solving
a proof in period four Geometry. You remember
the oily-comfort scent of plastic, the jangle
of two spools and two tiny rollers, the narrow
band of ferromagnetic tape. On the insert,
songs he might have thought were love songs,
“Jane Says” and “Suck My Kiss”. You rewound
that tape how many times? sitting on the worn
carpet of your bedroom with the music
just loud enough          to forget        and
the magazine models and actresses
taped to your closet door watching you
mouth the words and sway as you imagined
him listening to the same mix tape in his
messy sanctuary with the door closed to
his parents screaming at each other, again.
And you will hold that last note, off-key,
to the love-song not-love-song and dream
of a future so far away it can’t be seen
with the human eye, a future so up close
the doors will open all at once
as if a clock has struck.


Nicole Borg is a teacher, editor, poet and poetry cheerleader enamored with placeā€”the plains of ND, the Rocky Mountains, the desert of CA, and the high desert of CO. Her first poetry collection All Roads Lead Home (Shipwreckt Books, 2018) is like a poetry road trip. For five years, Nicole was co-editor of The Green Blade, magazine of the Rural America Writers’ Center, and now is the senior editor of the League of MN Poets' publication, Agates. Nicole lives along the lovely Mississippi River with her husband, two sons, black lab, and leopard gecko.


 

 

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