Three Poems

Mystique

Absolutely everything is the fault of the person in public speaking on the phone.

The driver of the Peter Pan bus, against all odds, was named Peter.

It could be a good job for you, I suggested to my father.

My father has a serious and inarticulable aversion to the phrase “jammy egg.”

In a certain way I comprehend it.

I keep wanting to say something.

She jammy on my egg til I yolk…

But I try to maintain a certain aura of mystique.

//

You’ll never guess her secret: local woman parties in a warehouse, sleeps 4 hrs, then hops on a Peter Pan bus to New York.

Oh you look so beautiful, my family kept cooing.

I tried to contain myself for a very long time.

But ultimately, after a certain surfeit of champagne, it is no longer possible to inhibit the onset of certain sentences.

Which is how I found myself saying to grandmother, at her 85th birthday celebration…

“So…do you know about bussy?”

“This is above my head or below my you know what,” she replied.

Hope

Hopelessly, I set another mousetrap.

Hopelessly, I practice a “shelter in place” drill.

Without hope, I check my reflection in the mirror to determine whether anything has changed.

Without hope, I walk inside a shop and gaze upon a carousel of greeting cards that each express emotions I can’t bring myself to possibly imagine.

Hopelessly, I contemplate a card that reads “My Shero.”

Hopelessly, I buy my grandmother a candle.

Hopelessly, I pile myself into bed at eleven pm and shut off the lamp on my bedside table, which bears for a base a mannequin’s calf, shoe, and foot.

Hopelessly, I wash my hands, singing “happy birthday” in my head.

Hopelessly, I gather words in a document and send them.

//

At work I regularly listen to discussions of “wordsmithing” and “baby showers.”

The unchecked horror of monotonous existence.

//

There is a certain period in the year when people who work in offices profess to a certain “madness,” which is metaphoric, and applies to their guesses as to the outcomes of sports games.

In the office chat, people write of “brackets” and “single-elimination.”

My boss had the much-lauded idea to build a “proximity bracket,” in which she picks whichever team is physically closest to us to win.

This is one of the few times betting becomes not only legal but encouraged in the workplace.

I declined to participate, not out of protest, but out of fear and dispassion.

Many things, in the workplace, strike me as essentially calamitous displays of metaphoric drift.

//

I think I’ve invented a new way of preparing eggs.

But if I told anyone the system might yield to complete and utter collapse.

Threat

We may win this time; we may lose.

A person on an application designed to bring two people together, then self-implode, promises not to employ AI to chat with me.

I am a vague, but assuredly real, intelligence.

I consistently take various sorts of public transit from one place to another.

Although in practice, I prefer to use my feet.

The buses run terribly behind with some consistency, on the schedule of a second tier metropolitan area undergoing a slight but perpetual crisis.

I hope someone will respond, my boss said, of the email requesting we not participate, going forward, in a meeting in which there is never anything for us to say or do.

The wreaths are arriving. It’s almost Easter.

Increasingly, I hear people claim to be “lifelong learners.”

Though in practice I have found fewer and fewer people are interested whatsoever in the possibility of having their minds changed one bit.

//

Every bit of applied pressure threatens to throw the whole quilting community into crisis.

I’ve been known to comment on things to displace my guilt.

A man walked by my apartment quite late in the evening.

He was screaming at the topmost tip of his lungs:

You don’t like my fucking humanity you don’t like my fucking language you don’t like my fucking dialect don’t fucking talk to me don’t you fucking talk to me fuck fuck fuck fuck.

It seemed to be the first sane thing I’d heard in years.

//

I had heard this week the clocks would be changing.

I had heard it once again would snow.

I had heard the cherry blossoms would not be able to withstand the onset of a surprise March frost.

I had heard a mouse trap snap in the night, though when I awoke it was still poised aloft a smear of almond butter.

I had heard a number of secrets I am not at liberty to tell.

I had heard about “liberty” and about “context collapse” and “our rights” and “polarized times” and “the conflict.”

I had heard they would be fixing the heat in the office.

I had heard official communications outlining the university’s official stance on “the conflict.”

I had heard I had a twin on the other side of the country, and was both “shocked” and “delighted” to find myself in a “Zoom room” with them mere weeks later.

I had heard a lot of bad things and only one good.

I had heard many sirens and no ice cream trucks.

I had heard there were Diet Cokes in the fridge, but upon investigation, all that was left was row upon row of glistening Sprite.

//

“Glistening” seems to have taken over as an internet aesthetic.

Everyone on my screen glows.

I’ve become so used to a “dewy eye” that it did not at first occur to me my coworker might be crying.

Upon realizing, I began to tear up, too.

Not so much out of sadness but out of surprise at the visceral manifestation of her emotion.

I was both “dismayed” and “embarrassed” by this obscene reaction.

I walked quickly in the other direction.

Peering into the mirror afterward, I had to acknowledge, my face did appear rather soft and angelically beautiful.

There is often something strange about my body I am teetering on the precipice of comprehending.