Poem for Friday, Tacoma Sea Glass, Designated Survivor

Sunday Mornings
By Steven Sanchez

Before sunrise, I collected the Sunday
ads and thumbed through the pages
of models I’d seen in my friend’s catalog

stored between his mattress and frame;
women wore bras with elegant black
letters scrawled across the page,

Limited Time Offer never touching
their skin.  But it was the men who excited
me.  Like a magician, I severed waists

from torsos, cut out pairs of briefs
with left-handed scissors and pressed
my thumb against their cotton

daggers.  Just below their necks
I sawed again, took the faces
beardless, square-jawed,

and pasted them onto broad shoulders
whose trapezius muscles rose
like pyramids I imagined climbing,

navigating the constellations of bodies
spread across the sky blue sheets
on my bed.  I rolled out the glue

stick from its sheath, the white tip
of a magic wand that could attach
the wide shoulders of Hanes models

onto lean torsos of the Fruit of the Loom
models and align their waists with
the briefs and legs of the Cheetah models.

I knew to hide these men inside
the pages of my dictionary, though words
clung to the wet curves of their bodies

like newspaper ink on my hands,
headlines and stories stained on my skin.

--------

Thursday mostly involved work and chores, driving Madeline back and forth, enjoying the gorgeous not-too-warm weather around the neighborhood, and snuggling with cats who are unimpressed with impending autumn. Here are some photos from Into the Deep at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, an exhibit exploring marine life using glass as a medium:


A glass octopus by Jennifer Caldwell and Jason Chakravarty


...and another by Paul DeSomma and Marsha Blaker-DeSomma, who made this in the Museum of Glass, where they met


This is Paul DeSomma's shark-tooth-lookalike Optical Effects OE071601


And his wife's Luscious Symbiosis


Benjamin Kikkert's Flotsam Harvest, Hollow Catch


Kait Rhoads' Red Polyp, made from hundreds of handmade pieces of glass


A lion fish by Vittorio Costantini


And Raven Skyriver's Tyee

Around baseball postseason games, we also watched the first three episodes of Designated Survivor, which had come highly recommended. After a couple of seasons of 24, I'm a Kiefer Sutherland agnostic, but I watched Nikita through to the last season, so having Maggie Q and Virginia Madsen unraveling and creating conspiracies respectively makes me very happy.