Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Thigh Gap

When you're 14, you wear a hole in the knee of your favorite jeans,
and it looks cooler that way sometimes,
but sometimes you just want a pair of perfect jeans.
You don't have the money for new jeans, though,
so you play with the frayed threads that span the hole
until they break.

When you're 41, you wear a hole in the inner thigh of your favorite jeans,
with the friction of your thighs touching as you walk,
and you're disappointed in your body, as usual,
and you wonder if other women are similarly plagued.
You can afford new jeans,
but for $60 a pair (on clearance now for $39.99!),
you feel like they could be made more durable.

Cold Case

I was pretty sure that he knew
what had happened to her that night,
even if he wasn’t the one
who made her disappear.
But the detective says
they’ve ruled him out as a suspect
or a witness.
But I know that he knows.

I follow him to the café,
where he sits near the revolving door.
He sips a latte and stares at his laptop
and doesn’t meet the eyes
of anyone around him.
Because he knows we all know
that he knows,
and he hasn’t been talking,
and he’s been letting us suffer
with the horrible visions of “what if.”

Is there some way to pry information
out of the mouth of another?
I wonder what he gets out of it,
what perverse thrill,
of having the answer
that could stop the sobbing of a brokenhearted mother
and the binge-drinking of her lost brother.
I follow him to the grocery store.
I park outside his home.
I stare at him as he stares at the TV,
and I will never stop
until he tells.
Because you can’t stop
when you know that he knows
that you know that he knows.


So I was half-watching the Science Channel
or Discovery Channel
or one of those,
and the show was speculating about
what would happen if the
enormous caldera under Yellowstone erupted.
And basically, we’d all be screwed.
I presume majestic buffalo and campers in their tents
would fly through the air from the explosion
and be incinerated,
and maybe someone like Bruce Willis or the Rock
could outrun a torrent of lava or ball of fire,
but Montana and Wyoming and Colorado
would be buried in ash,
and it would be like nuclear winter
everywhere else.
No air travel, no power, crop failure.
(And why do they show these doomsday programs
late at night when you’re trying to sleep?
Like I need one more fucking thing to worry about.)

I am terrified of unleashing my anger
at everyday provocations,
like rude drivers and passive-aggressive work emails,
and the ancient traumas that bubble threateningly
just under the surface.
I smile pacifically.
“No problem,” I chirp in response to the grossest imposition.
But if I were to vent, I am sure that
there would be a blast of bright light,
and nothing would be left of trees, people, cars, and houses
but piles of black ash for at least a five-mile radius.
Maybe later generations could reconstruct
peoples’ poses of terror and futile defense,
like the victims of Pompeii,
rebuilt in plaster.
Lava would shoot out of my mouth and eyes
and out of the ends of my hair.
The earth would shake under your feet
hundreds of miles away,
and if—IF—you survived,
you would tell your children and your grandchildren
that you could never erase from your mind
the sounds of the seemingly endless
deluge of profanity,
louder than any sound that’s ever been recorded
on modern instrumentation.
Luckily for you, this occurs only about
every few thousand years or so,
but no one knows the last time it happened,
so technically, it could happen at any second.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Fictional Love Story #7

I remember Paul.
He was the first really handsome guy
our company ever hired.
They fired him nine days later.
It was pretty spectacular.
Something about using his work computer
to make appointments with a local dominatrix
and moderating some online sadomasochism forum
during business hours.
When he was let go,
they changed the locks and the FedEx password.
(I’m not sure what they thought he would do
with that information.)
All the girls in the office squealed at the scandal,
perhaps secretly titillated,
but they publicly declared it “gross, super gross.”
I remember feeling lonely.
I wouldn’t date anyone at the office on principle,
but it was nice to see a ruggedly handsome face.
He had a dimple in his left cheek
and light blue eyes.
He mentioned a television show that I liked,
and we talked about it for a few minutes.
Then I got a phone call,
and he walked away,
and that was our only interaction.
I make pumpkin muffins every year in the fall,
for everyone in the office,
and I was sure he would have liked them.
Maybe he would have made a point
to say hi to me in the morning.
Maybe he would reliably remember my name.
Maybe we would have met up at a coffee shop
on a Saturday
or saw a movie together.
But now he is just a memory,
and I’m not even one of his references.

The Ballad of Udo

Once upon a time,
in Germany or Austria or somewhere like that,
I think sometime in the 1700s,
there was a man named Udo.
He wasn’t noble-born,
just a big nobody, and he was blind,
so he didn’t have much in the way of career prospects.
But he didn’t want to merely beg,
so he traveled from village to village
to be a storyteller.
And every afternoon, when the schools were dismissed
and the shops were nearly closed,
Udo would sit in the town square
and, in front of a small crowd, tell a story.
The problem was that he wasn’t very good at it.
Lots of um’s and hm’s and “Oh, wait, I forgot to mention…”,
and he couldn’t keep track of his characters’ names.
And eventually his crowd would lose interest
and drift away.
They had dinner to cook and children to tend to.
Some people felt sorry for him and dropped a coin in his cup.
Usually some asshole kid would steal it all
before he was finished, though.
And that was the life of Udo.

The devil was a lot more active
in people’s everyday lives back then.
Making nefarious deals, stealing souls, tricking virgins,
Etc. etc.
He was bored one day, hanging out on some village green,
watching Udo tell another poorly crafted tale.
The devil waited until the disappointed crowd had wandered away,
and turned the asshole kid into a rat before he could steal Udo’s money.
Then he walked up to Udo and said,
“I couldn’t help but notice that your storytelling could use a little work.
If you promise me your soul,
I’ll give you rich characters, fantastic plots, realistic dialogue
and perfect grammar.
Your work will be remembered.
Your work will be written down.
You will be immortal,
except for your soul, which will wind up in hell, of course.”
Udo spat, “Be gone, devil!”
And the devil had no choice but to vanish.
“My stories are just fine,” Udo told himself.
“The problem is that these fools don’t understand them.”
So Udo never achieved riches or world renown,
but he managed to marry into the lower middle class.
Some merchant’s tone-deaf daughter
who fancied herself a soprano.
And so he lived okay ever after,
and the asshole kid lived out the rest of his life as an asshole rat.

The Tea Drinker's Lament

Decaf Lipton?
You know what Decaf Lipton says, Sharon?
It says that you hate the tea drinkers in your life.
And don’t bother to hunt for the stray 10-year-old
bag of Earl Grey in your
sunny yellow kitchen cupboards.
You know that it tastes
the way an old lady smells.
I always bring my own tea bags in my purse.
You don’t even have a tea kettle, do you? No.
You are going to put water in a chipped coffee cup
and heat it up in the microwave.