Richard Peabody

I’m In Love with the Morton Salt Girl

DC Places Issue
Volume 7:3, Summer 2006

I’m in Love with the Morton Salt Girl

I’m in love with the Morton Salt girl.
I want to pour salt in her hair and watch
her dance. I want to walk with her through the
salt rain and pretend that it is water. I want to
get lost in the Washington Cathedral and follow her
salt trail to freedom.

I want to discover her salt lick in the forests of Virginia.
I want to stand in line for hours to see her walk on in
the middle of a movie only to have the film break and watch salt
pour out and flood the aisles. I want to sit in an empty theater
up to my eyeballs in salt and dream of her.

When I go home she will be waiting for me in her white dress
and I will drink salt water and lose my bad dreams.
I will seek the blindness of salt, salt down my wounds,
hang like a side of ham over the curtain rod in the bathroom
and let her pour salt directly on my body.

When she is done I will lick her salty lips with my tongue
and walk her down the stairs into the rain, wishing that I
could grow gills and bathe in her vast salt seas.

 

Richard Peabody is one of the founding editors of the literary journal Gargoyle, and the publisher of Paycock Press. He is the author of six books of poems, including Speed Enforced by Aircraft (Broadkill River Press, 2012) and Last of the Red Hot Magnetos (Paycock, 2004), and four books of fiction. He has edited a dozen anthologies, including the Gravity series of short fiction by DC-area women and the Mondo series of writing in response to pop icons. He has taught creative writing at University of Maryland, the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins University, and the Writer's Center. To read more by this author: Audio Issue, Profiles Issue, "Three DC Editors: Profiles of Caresse Crosby, William F. Clare, and Merrill Leffler," and Five Poems, Volume 4:1, Winter 2003