Poetry Corner Monday

Immortality

Sandra Beasley

Face it: I will never

appear on the flipside of a nickel,

or as a balloon floating down Fifth Avenue;

no one will give my name to a variety of rosebush,

or a way to throw fastballs, or a beetle

with four strange, silvery wings.

They say my spit's helixes will swim in the children

of my children but that's nothing more

than a simple whip graft, the way

a pear tree is bullied into fruit. My heart

is one yellow marble waiting in a swarm of yellow marbles,

waiting for someone to chalk lines of play, waiting

for the thumb of God. Inertia

is a poor man's immortality. Even

the ancient recipes have failed us now--

no more gilded eyelids or canonic jars, no more

baklava baking in the crypt

of my jaw. Call me

selfish, but who doesn't dream

of being both kites and wind, boat and ocean?

I want to be the ball and the bat and the mound

and the sweat and the grass. 

I want to be the vampire who drinks

a tall cool glass of me so he can live forever.

The Gorillas Are Trying to Kill Me

I'm being hunted by flies. And I'm not just talking your average everyday grotesque-but-reasonably-sized housefly. These things are mammoths. They're the size of my thumb nail (and I have giant thumbs) and they sound like weed whackers even from across the room. If Jeremy from Sports Night were to see these beasts, he would deduce that they have some sort of stealth capabilities. And they're following me everywhere. They're on my bedside table when I wake up, dead in mounds on my windowsill when I lift the blinds. They dot the white ceiling like demonic winged stars in an inverted night sky.

One gorilla fly, or approximately
seven normal flies stuck together.

The weather has been uncommonly gorgeous for the past few days, so I've thrown open the windows and doors and welcomed in the fresh, warm air. Unfortunately this also means welcoming in the flies. When I was leaving the house this morning for the library, I passed through the mudroom and glanced briefly into the laundry room as I opened the back door. To my absolute horror, there were literally hundreds of these massive gorilla flies--also known as "the gorillas"--flat up against the windows. Now, I do not mean "literally" like, oh, 75% of the American population when they say inaccurate things like "My heart was literally beating out of my chest" or "I was literally dying of laughter." I mean it in the way it's meant to used. There were literally hundreds of gorillas, and they all wanted to kill me.

Because I couldn't stand the thought of these creatures enjoying the inside of my house for the duration of my errand, I did what I do every summer when we get an infestation of fruit flies: I pulled out the vacuum. Having added the extra-long hose and two stiff plastic tubes to the end, I held the contraption in front of me, like a light saber or Inigo Montoya's sword outside the Pit of Despair, and flipped on the switch. Immediately a thick black plume erupted into the air. Gorillas everywhere. I've never been afraid of flies before--certainly I dislike them immensely and find them to be disgusting nuisances--but at the moment of the Great Gorilla Cloud of 2015, I was legitimately terrified. I actually cowered behind the extension hose in my hand and shut my eyes.

A little slice of hell.

After about fifteen minutes of intense fly demolition, I had cut the population to less than one-tenth what it had been. Satisfied for the moment, I left for the library. I should have known that, while I was away, the flies that remained would call in reinforcements that were even bigger and blacker and nastier than their vacuumed brethren. If the first wave had been gorillas, these were the blue whales of the fly kingdom. I bet they could even breathe underwater.

I know when I've been outsmarted. I lay down the hose and backed slowly into the kitchen, easing the door shut in front of me. I can only imagine what they've done to the laundry room in the hour since. As for me, I intend to never do laundry again. Besides, I'm much too busy cleaning the floor under the dining table, which has become my elderly cat's new favorite litter box.

Best Saturday ever.

So That Happened

1. I'm currently sitting at a table in the cafe of my local bookstore, "looking for jobs." I give this phrase the safety of quotation marks because I find I'm much less hard on myself for failing to accomplish tasks I've arbitrarily encased in quotes. And also because, as I get weirdly self-conscious looking for employment in public, what I'm doing right now could hardly be construed as seeking employment in any logical way.

My usual seat next to the wall is occupied, so I'm out here in the open next to the New Science Fiction section. I feel exposed and vulnerable, like I'm presenting myself for the Red Carpet Fashion Police. Except instead of judging my ensemble, the ghost of Joan Rivers is directing her raspy, snide remarks toward the fact that I'm contemplating a job listing for a male bilingual case aide when I am neither male nor bilingual (nor, for that matter, a case aide).

Every time I sense someone coming up behind me I switch my internet tab to npr.org to make myself look smart and not at all unemployed. I must seriously rethink this approach. I just frantically minimized Craigslist and the NPR headline on the page behind it was "Haunted Dolls are a Thing, and They're Not Cheap, Either." Good, Margoshes. Excellent. Because nothing says "I'm a stable human being" quite like pretending to read articles about wind-up dolls. I bet every person in this bookstore just saw my computer screen and is thinking, "What an intellectual, well-rounded adult female she is. She's sure got her finger on the pulse of this nation's problems. Now there's someone who is definitely not looking for a job."


2. As I sat there, "looking for a job," I overheard a young man at the cafe counter ordering his lunch. "Can I have the broccoli cheddar soup?" he asked. The barista asked how many crackers he would like, which I found an odd question but evidently the customer did not. "Three packets," he said, pausing a moment before adding, "I was going to reply with something esoteric like, 'As many as will fit into a baby's hand,' but I thought that might be weird." The barista laughed. "And can I get a drip coffee, too?" the man asked. "What size?" the barista answered. "Enough to fit in a baby's hand?"


3. [From early February] I think I may be losing my mind, and not in the I-put-six-socks-in-the-washing-machine-and-only-five-came-out kind of way. I mean that for the past two weeks, the only thing I've wanted to do is sit on my bedroom floor, hunched uncomfortably over a jigsaw puzzle while listening to NPR stories I've already heard. Sometimes this Rockwellian scene includes a steaming mug of tea, but most of the time it's just me, Robert Siegel of All Things Considered, and a puzzle of Moscow's onion domes in the dead of night, where half the picture is entirely black and all the pieces are the exact same shape.


4. For Christmas/my birthday, my friend gave me a five-year, one-sentence-a-day journal. Each page is dated at the top and has five groups of lines with enough space for you to fill in the year and summarize your day in a single sentence. A few nights ago I decided to read back through what I've written so far. On March 10th, I was mopey and depressed and contemplating the merits of spending the rest of my life in a cave I would dig in the backyard. One day later, after hours spent painting trim in the kitchen, I wrote "In case the issue ever arises again, remember that paint is NOT an adequate substitute for caulk." Between this and monitoring the popularity of our country's haunted dolls, I'm really tackling the hard-hitting issues over here. You're welcome, everybody.