Charles Rammelkamp

Speed Queen 

When the plumber told me
my best bet was a Speed Queen,
the old Maytag just not up to the job,
I remembered Shirley, 
the girl in college half a century ago
who sold me and my classmates 
the little white pills we used
to study for exams, stay up late
writing term papers.
That was Shirley’s nickname, Speed Queen.

And when the plumber quoted a ballpark price,
I remembered, too,
the expense of the study aids
on a college student’s budget.

Speed Queen – it sounded like something from a Who song,
a pinball wizard of an appliance, 
and I remembered that Medieval lit. paper
on Chrétien de Troyes, his Arthurian romances,
buzzing on Shirley’s white crosses late at night.
Rinse and spin.

The Poetry Editor

“You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer.” – Beatles, “Helter Skelter”

When I googled the editor
of the poetry journal 
that had just taken three of my poems –
not a common name, 
but there’s always someone –
I read a story about a woman
who’d spent three years
in a South American prison,
a notorious hellhole off the coast of Venezuela,
sentenced to ten years for smuggling cocaine,
a drug mule for a Texas gang,
but she escaped after starting a romance 
with one of the prison guards.

The prison was Lord of the Flies on steroids.
Inmates patrolled the grounds with shotguns,
the gangs left alone to themselves so long
as they didn’t try to run away.
But eventually her lover got her a day pass,
and she hightailed it to Colombia,
then flew back home to London,
her boyfriend Jose joining her later.

So then she wrote a book
about her experience, feeling empowered 
by her prison escape, 
“because if I could do that?
I could achieve anything.”

Like edit a poetry magazine?
Could this be the same person?

 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. A collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was published in 2025 by BlazeVOX Books. His collection, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, was recently published by Kelsay Books.