Hey. I’m reading Donne. In pre-digested bits, sure, but someone’s made beans of it all and the lines, once inside me, gurgle and spit. Have you ever seen a woman chew up a grape for her teething child? More than one woman in more than one park has done this. I am grateful.
In Chile, they’re loading straws full of poems into the ground. And food capsules. NASA and Neruda, dense as shit. But you don’t want to hear that.
Today I did my duty: filled bubbles with a ballpoint pen; peed on a stick; took five types of pills and rubbed spearmint on my neck. Also ate the seeds of an apple. Also waited. Also wrote it down.
Yesterday, the microwave beeped at the same time I should have left the house--or stirred something or flipped something or put whites in the dryer. It beeped but I was tiling and dirty. I was making something. Churning sand into the color of my wrists and pressing it into place. Listening to Beckett. And remembering that time in college when I thought I was pregnant. Meanwhile, something was sticking to the bottom of a pan.
Back then, Steve would use anything to roll a joint, the Book of Mormon or a Chinese menu. Religious texts are best, he said. God, I get itchy just thinking of that van.
I’m itchy in general. My pulse is 116. You want nothing to happen? Here’s a vein of paper that cannot be mined. Something charred no one will eat. A scattering of seeds on my mid-term ballot. Here: everything’s small so you can swallow it.
Jill Leininger's poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, and are forthcoming in Harvard Review. She’s currently mutating stories, battening down the hatches, and not writing a play in Johnson, Vermont.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment