For Love Of An Armadillo

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For Love of an Armadillo Didi Menendez Jeremy Baum

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For Love of an Armadillo Poems by

Didi Menendez Illustrated by

Jeremy Baum

Published by GOSS 183::CASA MENENDEZ www.mipoesias.com Bloomington, Illinois Copyright © 2008-2009 Didi Menendez and Jeremy Baum

Decicated to our friend John Korn.

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CONTENTS Armadillo 1 Armadillo 3 Shadowbox 5 Armadillo and the Hollywood Starlets 7 Let s Dance 11 Armadillos Shoes 13 Conquest 15 Armadillo s Kisses 17 Lives 19 Armadillo and Andalucia 21 The Conquistador 25 Armadillo s Dice 27 More 31 Armadillo s Armor 33

Armadillo

ARMADILLO There is an armadillo burrowed into my chest.

One day I woke up and there was the armadillo filling up the arroyo I have become.

My breasts have made way to accommodate the armadillo.

Sometimes the armadillo shells out a ballad.

I am not sure how the armadillo found his way into my life.

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Each day the armadillo digs deeper and deeper into the cavity of what used to be my heart.

I tell myself not to feel for the armadillo. No respectable woman my age should feel for an armadillo.

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Shadowbox

ARMADILLO AND THE Armadillo loves insects. He collects them ever since he can remember. Armadillo has a wide variety of butterflies and moths not to mention exotic species such as the Mexican Fruit Fly and the Africanized Honey Bee. Armadillo has acquired his collection from his travels abroad and through his many incarnations. Armadillo loves bugs almost as much as Hollywood Starlets. In the 20’s Armadillo fell head over heels for Greta Garbo. He followed her everywhere until one day Greta had to tell him “I want to be alone.” 7

HOLLYWOOD STARLETS In the 30’s Armadillo seduced Jean Harlow. In the 40’s it was Judy Garland. Although Judy was short and brunette, Armadillo cherished her. In the 50’s Doris Day wanted to be in the picture but Armadillo said none of that and he left Hollywood only to turn up in Las Vegas in the 60’s along with the remains of the Rat Pack. Armadillo hung out with Sinatra. When Armadillo was introduced to Mia Farrow, he thought his heart had stopped beating and he was going to leave earth. Armadillo’s heart survived the pixie like woman who resembled his fast growing bug collection and shared quiet moments with the starlet while old blue eyes was belting a tune. Armadillo followed her everywhere right into the 70s while she played opposite of Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby. 8

ARMADILLO AND THE HOLLYWOOD STARLETS

For the first time in his life Armadillo became jealous. He was no competition for Woody Allen who in a way was just another big cucaracha so he finally felt he must leave Mia forever and followed a Monarch butterfly into the next decade. Armadillo was lost in the 80’s. He found himself lonelier than ever and resorted to his ant farm for comfort. He became enamored with new and never before seen creatures traveling near and far to find them until one day he ended up here with me and here we are under each other’s microscope until it is time to say Adios Armadillo.

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Let’s Dance

ARMADILLO’S SHOES Armadillo please take out your dancing shoes. Here is the polish. How do you expect to have an audience unless you start tapping? Where is the applause? Shine those shoes please. I will spit on them for you. Armadillo you sure look snappy. Come on Armadillo We’ll play Benny Goodman records and we’ll mambo with Xavier Cougat.

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I’ll knit you a sweater. We can share a sandwich. The coca-cola is chilling in the ice box. If you are really good, we can Chattanooga Choo Choo. After you are done with the tapping and you are full of perspiration I want to dance with you slow under the drunken moon. I want to have your drops of sweat drop on my brow as if I did all the work. I want to place my ear against your heart so we can share the rattle. I want you to kiss me Armadillo. I want you to kiss me. I want you to kiss me hard.

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Conquest Conquest

ARMADILLO’S KISSES Armadillo only kisses me when there is a full moon or when it rains. Sometimes we lay in bed and stare at the ceiling’s lamp. Sometimes Armadillo gives me a back rub. He places his bony fingers around my neck and massages away the day’s thoughts. Sometimes Armadillo puts his mouth near my ear and whispers a poem he wrote on a napkin during lunch. Besides these rare occasions we hardly ever touch. We watch reruns of Alias Smith and Jones instead. We have a debate as to why the main character was murdered by his girlfriend. 17

Sometimes Armadillo comes up with a better answer than mine. Sometimes I win the debate. Sometimes we discuss who was scarier Bella Lugosi or Boris Karloff? Sometimes I make Armadillo dinner. His favorite is shellfish although I must be very careful never to serve him snails al ajillo because snails remind him of his first love. Tonight there will be a full moon and the weather channel is predicting rain. Tonight Armadillo will put his boney fingers around my neck and place his other boney hand in the small of my back and lean down and kiss me first softly and then with emotion as if he has never kissed me under the full moon or rain before and I will pull him close to me so I can feel everything that is hard about Armadillo as if life were not hard enough. 18

Lives

ARMADILLO AND My name is Andalucia. Some people call me Lucia. Some people call me Andy. Some people call me Lucie. Some people call me Loo Loo. Armadillo calls me Dominique. He says I remind him of a nun. Armadillo wears an armor everywhere he goes. He even wears it to bed. He said he got it when he was a conquistador with Ponce de Leon. I told him I died at Auschwitz Birkenau. He believed me. I believed him. 21

ANDALUCIA That subject was closed. We never brought it up again. I did not tell him about my previous deaths. They were all monstrous or tragic or incomprehensible except for that one time when I died while making love to a woman in Josephine Bonaparte’s court and in a way I will have to put that death on the inconvenience list. I have died as a man. I have died as a woman. I have died as child. I have died as a newborn. I have been a still death.

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ARMADILLO AND ANDALUCIA

Armadillo’s name is not really Armadillo. I call him Armadillo because of the conquistador armor. His real name may be Harry or Richard or Tom. I don’t know because he never offered to tell me. I never asked. I never ask Armadillo anything. He never asks me anything either except for the occasional what’s for dinner? I once served him picadillo and we could not stop laughing right into the next century.

Tonight we will watch tv.

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ARMADILLO AND ANDALUCIA

The Streets of San Francisco. Sanford and Son. The Jeffersons. The Carol Burnett Show. The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The Dick Van Dyke Show. The Ed Sullivan Show. The Andy Griffith Show. Bridget Loves Bernie. Love American Style. Mod Squad. Mannix. The Flying Nun. Nanny and the Professor. Marcus Welby M.D. Medical Center. Welcome Back Kotter. The Odd Couple. Flipper. We always watch reruns. This is what we understand best.

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The Conquistador

ARMADILLO’S DICE Armadillo has gone for a walk. I never leave this house. He says the armor is weighing him down. A walk will do him well. He will be gone for exactly one light year. His walks are never longer than that. I want to go back to when I was 14. It was 1934 in Berlin and the streets were bustling with traffic and it seemed like everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere, anywhere except no one was really moving. I was headed to the Cinema to watch the latest film from Hollywood. I was a scrawny girl with auburn hair and my face had not caught up to my nose. I combed my hair like Ginger Rogers. 27

My friends and I are headed inside the dark smoky theatre where everyone is taking a seat and standing up and taking a seat and laughing and then crying as if they were the ones in the film until silence takes over with a hush. Hush someone says and then another and then another please hush please be quiet, please be quiet, please. This is when Armadillo returns from his walk which took exactly one light year which to a human equals exactly 15 minutes and 7 seconds. Armadillo looks over to me and I know what he wants so I put away my 14 year old self and go back to being the nun-like creature he understands and offer to give his armor a rub. 28

ARMADILLO’S DICE

I rub him down. I rub him down with precision. I use my own fingers in between each groove between each crease. I rub him down. I rub him down until the weight of every single moment in time is released. He says to me: I was in Las Vegas in 1965. I was sitting by the roulette table. Mia Farrow blew my dice

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More

ARMADILLO’S ARMOR Armadillo sat at the foot of the bed. He said it was time. He said he had to leave now. I wanted to tell him next time we would do things different. We would be born in the same decade. We would have nine to five jobs. We would meet at the Deli for lunch. We would order the same sandwich. Tuna on rye.

We would get married in a church with a steeple We would have 2.3 children. We would turn our taxes in ahead of time. We would be into sports, racquetball, basketball, football, tennis and cheer for the same team. 33

We would join the PTO. We would be President of the PTO. We would vacation in Lake Tahoe. We would vote Republican. We would buy a home in the suburbs. We would celebrate our anniversary past 50 years. We would be buried in the same cemetery with matching headstones. Once death was staring back at me, I pulled a cobra from my mouth. It slithered by my frost bitten toes. My uterus gave birth to clots of baby parts. My colon expelled Francis Bacon. Garcia-Lorca stood in front of the firing squad. I coughed up a frozen lake. Che pointed a rifle to my left temple. I pulled the nails from my bloody fingers. George Harrison handed me his guitar. 34

ARMADILLO’S ARMOR

Cole Porter sang Begin the Beguine. Hedda Hopper jotted it all down. Armadillo stood from the foot of the bed and looked at the vast eternity above him. Armadillo then looked below to the same eternity. This was when he shed the armor and left and this was when I found myself crying at the top of my lungs as a woman held a breast to my mouth and I, defenseless, suckled on to dear life.

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Didi Menendez is a cuban-blooded American artist, editor, publisher and author. She lives in the middle of nowhere.

Jeremy Baum is an American artist and illustrator. He lives in Pennsylvania.

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