This is where we should have made love: my body flat against the back lawn of this summer house once visited, the grass green and cut like the nape of your neck after the barber's trim. I don't move except my eyes which roam through neighborhoods of stars. Framed by pine trees, I can almost reach their needles grazing the night. But the porch light is just slight enough to fix me here. The whir of the washing machine escapes the screen door, and a telephone line, strung like those taut velvet ropes in wax museums, keeps you from this world. My body now with the urge to make wingspans, a flash of divinity children mark in snow. It's what we attribute to that split moment of a star we know to be dying, or worse, and don't mourn, but gasp for the way it leaves itself sexless. We should have died here. Reprinted with permission from Ploughshares Copyright © 1992 by Sandra Yannone

My Date With Elvis: Cybill Shepherd, 1973 by Sandra Yannone

He said he'd meet me at the theater, and since the boy in the ticket booth knew Elvis bought all the seats for the late show, he didn't bother to ask if I was Elvis's date or to notice I was the pretty face on all the magazine covers the girls he was too afraid to ask out read for makeup and dating tips. He simply pointed at the metal doors. Only the dull yellow of the midnight popcorn machines lit the center of the lobby, the gleaming candy counters, abandoned like carnival rides in the summer evening rain. Inside, the houselights had just gone down. I peered through the portholes on the red plush doors to see if he glowed over his friends. No one resembled him in the sporadic dark. There was just the noise of the projector shuffling its images against the wide screen and the occasional moans of muffled back-row love, and I thought I would cry if he stood me up, a twenty-three-year-old Memphis girl gone Hollywood and come home, now waiting in the eighth-row center for Elvis. The opening credits began to unravel their large cursive names, and I felt someone watching me against the backdrop of the screen. I turned around and in the doorway saw his silhouette looming larger than he looked on the big screen in Blue Hawaii. He was a whole parade moving down the aisle, waving to his small clusters of friends in the dark. He handed me a large bucket of popcorn and settled down for the film, and when he brushed his buttery hand across my right cheek, he smelled wonderful. Reprinted with permission from Ploughshares Copyright © 1991 by Sandra Yannone

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