Poems by Leah Mueller
By Leah Mueller
One night,
while aboard
a Mexican cruise ship, I had a dream
with a musical score: a
random woman materialized
from nowhere. Planting
herself in the center of the room,
she threw back her head and crooned:
“Where you gooooo-ing
with my sweet potato?
Guess I better have it for free.”
She repeated her song
dozens of times, until
I finally awakened. I never figured out
why my subconscious felt so
obsessed with sweet potatoes,
to the point of singing
about them repeatedly.
There could be a part of me
with sweet potato qualities,
but a lack of self-esteem.
Forty years later, I recall the dream
each time I pierce the dense meat
of a perfect sweet potato.
Guess I’d better have it for free.
“The Land of Elote”
By Leah Mueller
I never expected to taste elote
for the first time, in a forest
ten miles from the Canadian border,
after living four years in the Sonoran Desert
and never trying the dish: sweet corn cobs
slathered with piquant chili powder,
drenched in warm, vegan mayonnaise,
and served on a colorful platter.
I drown each kernel
in oceans of amber beer.
Mt Baker Highway, a shaky oasis:
barbeque restaurant, dead center of Glacier.
I am the only customer.
Five years ago, I fled this town,
just as I have every other,
pitched my ruined tent in a more arid land.
When my bones become dust,
I left in search of water.
Elote tastes like the southern border,
unafraid to make noise, but Canada
watches from a remote perch, mountains
covered with April snow.
I am miles away from both places,
pint glass half-empty,
my hands sticky from mayonnaise,
lost forever in the land of elote.
- Leah Mueller’s work is published or
forthcoming in Rattle, Writers Resist, Beach Chair Press, NonBinary
Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Citron Review, New Flash
Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your
Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart
and Best of the Net. One of her short stories appears in the 2022 edition of
Best Small Fictions. Her fourteenth book, “A Pretty Good Disaster” will be
published by Alien Buddha Press in Summer 2025. Website: www.leahmueller.org