Creation @ Dutch Treats
By Dana Gerringer & Kara L.C. Jones

I sat in the window
and looked upon

unsheathed again
scabbard of skin
wondering why I
could never be yielded by him

and Sinatra played, making me weigh
the importance of life and love and hurt

one handle by the bathtub
one handle behind my ribs
I rode the tears up the steepest hill
and listened to the spokes catching on every breath

walking past the marquee, I thought it said Matrix
but really it said Marlene Dietrich & somehow
I was tossed back in time, but

I only know the time by the traffic
the ones that time did not change for
nothing is ever so precious, as the moment
right before it brakes...

at the post office, the grumpy old man was mean but
outside the old man on the bench with the ice cream cone
was nice, and

the flowers on my plate were real
but I could not eat them
it seemed that nothing beautiful
would ever pass through me again...

and then,
in very un-original fashion,
we lived happily ever after.

This poem was written over lunch at the Dutch Treats Cafe in Ballard, Washington. We took one piece of paper and took turns writing stanzas. As one of us finished a stanza, we'd fold the paper back so the other of us couldn't see what was written prior. The way these stanzas fit together amazed us both, and we thought you'd all appreciate it, too.