my friends and cousin implored me to stay 
at the bar when I twirled and told them, grinning, 
I was leaving with three young men I’d just met. 
next morning when I drug back into the shack 
I told the story of the mansion where I had landed,  

such as the height of the ceilings and how many 
bathrooms it had and of the host’s bragging 
while serving liquor I had no appreciation for 
and the endlessly seeming lines of cocaine 
and exhaust of primo weed and the cobalt blue tile 
of the kitchen counters and walls and the butcher  

block isle below hanging every kind of copper 
-bottomed pan and pot and of all the time  

those boys spent on the phone futilitarian trying 
to find prostitutes with no notice at three or four 
in the morning and how disappointed they were  

and how I allowed six hands all over me for six 
crisp hundred-dollar bills and a sunny side up 
and wheat toast breakfast with whipped butter  

by sterling silver spreader 
in air-conditioned sit down 
and a forty-five-mile ride  

home in the land rover after and when I looked up 
at my cousin across coffee cups, she asked how 
I always found the richest guys no matter what,  

whatever room we would drop you in, 
from hundreds 
of men, you always pick them, every time, 
how do you do it, 
is it the shoes, 

no anyone can buy shoes, I said,  

but what then,  

all I could see were her fractured blue eyes 
of our childhood,  

it’s their eyes. there’s a comfort there. 
it’s the comfort that attracts me. 
it’s in their eyes.  

she nodded so mildly 
no one else must have noticed 
but she and I knew   

and we were back sitting on the bank 
in scratchy grasses making sassafras tea, 
with yellow sun baking our yellow and white 
and ash and wheaten heads, fresh pulled and shook 
in a bottle we found half full with mud 
and washed out in the crystal creek 
where there were no mothers 
trading daughters to men in the dark 

Ranney Campbell is author of the poetry chapbooks, "Pimp," "Charcoal and Ink,” "the desert so," and “Caddish.” Other of her creative writing has appeared in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Storm Cellar, Reed Magazine and elsewhere. She is from St. Louis, but lives in the extreme southernmost Sierra Nevada of California.