Arrogance
it ought to have altered my existence. I observed him bent above his composition, hours consumed informing minuscule granules
of tinted sand of his convoluted plans on the soil, sketching cobalt flowers,
scarlet flowers, a single colossal blossom obscuring the dried, packed earth.
It was so lovely,
I would have given everything to be able to roll it up in its entirety
and take it back home with me, but the storm stole it minutes after
it was finished, spreading fantastic ribbons of contrasting dye
against one another until there was nothing left but flawed, vaguely
grayer smudges striping the blond sameness of the barren sand. the tiny man
rose to his feet, beamed at me as though he had intended on the storm,
and walked slowly away. it should have changed my life. I should have
taken it away with me his lack of creative arrogance, his readiness to just
let his day evaporate in the quest for a small moment of exquisite beauty,
and just the beauty of that one small moment.
I was wholly determined to go home and expunge the whole
of what I had ever composed that day, that week, that whole
crazy year of my life, overflowing as I was
with the little man’s palpable happiness at the creation of something
so temporary. I figured that taking joy in just the act of writing
should be adequate for me, too. I sat in my tent for hours, gazing at page
after page of hurriedly-scribbled poems, annotations,
fictions, tomes almost started and some almost finished
and couldn’t do it. I failed. I wanted to. I would like to be released
of this baggage of miscellaneous papers,
to set fire to all my petty dreams, disperse the pieces of me that are frozen
in those notes
but I haven’t the power to set them all free.
The Tooth Fairy Dreams of an Apocalypse
It’s all there for free now, all there for her
swooping down in plain sight, in
broad daylight, hands out in hungry claws pulling
all those lovely teeth loose. No more need for
fancy hairdos, or sparkly
pink dresses, or even
the crystal scepter, now that there are no more
insomniac children left to catch her in the act.
She can wear anything she
wants now, jeans, a t-shirt, a backwards baseball cap, a
food-splattered muumuu, or even nothing at all.
Nobody’s left to see her do her work, tugging
stubborn teeth free from blast-cleaned skulls
with a rusty set of pliers, a
string tied to an anvil, an old claw hammer.
It’s all there for free now. No more
dollars to leave for teeth.
My Husband Comments On How I’ve Let Myself Go
he tells me I remind him
of a beached whale lying in
bed in the morning I close my
eyes and imagine myself
being picked apart by the claws of
tiny sand crabs burrowed into
by thin red beach worms
gobbets of flesh ripped
from my carcass by flocks of sea gulls
luring even the raccoons down
from the stubby forest
following the shore. he asks me
if I feel ashamed of myself
and I don’t answer because
I feel dead already I’m
too busy
imagining the shock of
girl scout troops stumbling across
my massive corpse in the shallows
the feel of their tiny hands
on my body joined by the larger hands
of Greenpeace workers and passing
tree huggers as they try
to push me back
into the water
hoping somehow that this half-eaten
cold and lifeless body might
magically come back to
life and swim away if only
they could get me back
into the water.