Mustang Sally Considers the Occult
As a Solution to the Man Shortage
Recently Reported in Cosmo
Yeah. That'd work. Just slide up to him
tomorrow at the copier, press twelve
burnt wicks into his palm and purr,
"I want you so bad I burned candles
around your digitized black-and-white
company-brochure picture all night.
And today, I bring you string."
The frog bone trick's less obvious, at least.
But, eeewww! Wear one bone, hook another
on the clothing of your would-be lover.
Nothing in the books says just lay one on him,
or even, smile, offer to buy him coffee.
Not that those have worked, but they don't shake
my faith in the general apathy of the universe.
Imagine the stealth-starred conspiracy stirred
by a spell to snare him if you wear nothing
but fuchsia for a month and chant his name
every night under your bed, attired only in
one of his ties. And the energy!
Take the tie when he steps out to lunch,
color your clothes to match your clitoris,
learn his whole name—no skimping there,
purloin company records if necessary.
Je-sus! How many felonies and angels
can love afford one person?
Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt
To Wilson Pickett
Aretha Franklin named me.
She heard Sir Mack Rice stir into
a Blue Rock records track he called
Mustang Mama until she told him
Sally sounded better when he wailed.
Mom says the winter I was born,
well, before that, I kicked
every time it hit the radio.
Says that's how she knew my name.
Not that the birth certificate says
Mustang, but all the same, that's me.
Yeah, I know. Little white girl
with a name like mine, somebody's
gonna bitch about appropriation,
that hitch, one bunch of us
snitching something from another,
busting it to fit an awkward hole
in what we've got. That's, anyway,
what Marta thought last time we talked.
What I'm thinking's mostly
that I ought to say thank you
and give credit where it's due.
Sir Mack Rice? Pickett's mentor.
Recorded it in sixty-four.
See, even Wilson got it second hand
from somebody who knew better.
Mustang Sally Talks About
Marta's Movie Addiction
She thinks Jerry Maguire
is a movie to live by.
She believes in E.T., the Force,
and hot buttered popcorn.
She understands all of it
is prepackaged for secondary sales
on pay-per-view and home video.
Still, she wants to wake up,
Groundhog Day after Groundhog Day
until she gets it right.
Until she manages to make the shot
where she sits on the edge of the pool table,
arches her back and pockets the eight
without looking at the cue behind her.
Until she drops down off the table right
in front of him, and remembers to smile,
catch his chin on her finger, balance it there
like the promise of a crescent moon.
Mustang Sally Watches Cindy Sherman Work
Marta got us in through a friend of a friend.
Cindy wanted somebody who knew Iowa,
so here we are, cupping Quik Shop coffee,
as Cindy Sherman shoots herself in Winterset,
at Roseman Bridge, under the farm light of five a.m.
She struts around in overalls, DeKalb cap askew,
workboots Sally muddied yesterday caked on her New York feet.
She's all farm hand right now, leaned against
the covered bridge like Eastwood and Streep.
She looks the part. She even smells like cigarettes,
but not corn or soap or tar.
Tomorrow we'll go to Davenport, for the tollbooth
on Centennial bridge, then out to a softball field,
the Tastee-Freeze on Rockingham, the pasty lights
of Northpark Mall where she'll pose, hair-netted,
in the candy kitchen of the Fanny May.
Then Waterloo, Whatcheer, Vinton, Solon,
Council Bluffs, and Muscatine.
She says, around a Tootsie Pop this time,
she wants to make her face a state. She knows
New York is written into every weathered line
around her eyes, that Iowa will be ersatz on her,
fake as her muddy feet, but she believes
in shifting geographies. She always has.
Mustang Sally Confesses Her Love of Lady Liberty
She’s just so earnest. All that gorgeous seriousness,
and still no wrinkles! She’s the original bo-tox babe.
And who doesn’t love a woman in a toga? Imagine her
at seventeen, a naiad escaped from the harbor,
wide-eyed and sandal-shod, fleet-footed foremother
to the mermaiden Madison of Splash!. Her world
unmarred by global conflict, though it would come. She looks
now as she must have looked even then: ready for it.
What must have passed once for innocence, even piety
—the lifted chin, the impassive eyes, that upraised arm
and the book held like a shield—looks more to me like
stern resolve. Liberty Enlightening the World she was
when Bartholdi made her, a woman on a mission,
like Carrie Nation, Sojourner Truth, the other women
whose archetypal shadows fall across the pages of our history.
But she’s more than mortal, more than abstract or historical,
and she knows what goes on behind her back.
The attacks did not escape her notice and neither have
our own frightened responses. And yet she has said nothing,
just stood looking over the water, her arms as open as ever,
keeping her peace. I tell you, I’m carrying a torch for her.