The Woman With The Woodpecker Laugh Poem by Michael Philips

Her near death experience whether fiction or truth
becomes the story repeated in car rides home

or how she talked her way out of that speeding ticket,
the woman with the woodpecker laugh

dancing naked across the stage under white light,
her full breasts and large lips win camera votes

and are the sea anchors for the memory eyes of men
but her first-personal safaris are her real propulsion.

We are children pleading for another bedtime tale.
Tell me the one about the bike accident and your amnesia again,

The car dealership one, how you sued their ass and won,
Some are embroidered patches, some full tapestries,

Some are timeline murals where we place our own markers,
and I’m the one who gets in bed with all of them.