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November 3, 2014 Poetry

3 Poems

Wendy Neale

3 Poems photo

My friend’s friend dated Mario Lopez in college

There you go, in the papers again. Your mouth a hawk dive; your fists up and double-siloed. While you play overcast, we tend to the beetle gardens, play our thumb guitars. I remember the day you happened. Suddenly, up from the monolith farms, colostrum-stewed with power plant thighs. Now you wander the streets kicking our bonsai trucks. I have day terrors that what you think is your shoe is actually my garage. I wonder if you remember you started out small. It must get to you, the Niagara sound of our millions of faucets humming at night. When you die, you will lay across fifteen city blocks. “Go water, go,” you will probably think, “carry me.” There’s now thirty thousand times more of you, but we can only remember so much. 

 

That, we have in common

The breakfast echo is back again. Each morning we flip through our well catalogues. True, wells perform one basic function but having well options makes life seem longer. If you were lucky, wells littered your yard. Wells now have ten times the levers, mirrored interiors, provide printout projections and kitten elevators. One day I looked out between my rigs to find hundreds of news crews gathered. It had been discovered that I had the same well as Steve Perry. At that moment I knew somewhere Steve Perry was at his own well lowering his rope and reeling it back, over and over through the night, peering inside the bucket each time hoping it might reveal something completely different.

 

STAN (What lights his eyes)

He’s down from his gnome shelf again, our Stan. Within minutes our holiday hands perk. The dog barks tinsel, my mothers’ cinder rises. Stan knows ours is a season of forgetting, he might only get 10-12 good hours of us. It always ends abruptly, our arms akimbo in the midst of some yuletide task. The carpet dissolves, our faces canopy-collapse. “We never mourn Stan,” my father reminds us, placing him back on the hearth. But then Dad has a thing about being in charge. “Dad,” I call when I see him palm Stan’s dead batteries again. He buries them every year like this, marks each plot with a tongue depressor, “STAN” he writes on every one. It takes practice, we think; it must be hard sharing your own name like that.

 

image: Anita Olivia Koester


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