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we all scream in delight

by Katie Eber 

Poetry

A Hypothetical Conversation, Back of the School Bus, November 1996

There’s a low thump of bodies
bouncing on vinyl
as the bus 
lurches over a speed
bump like a grandfather,
leaning back,
then forward,
and we all scream in delight                
all of us first graders
off to control our sense
of wonder in an aquarium
or in a museum where
signs say don’t touch

off on one of those field trips that erodes children into cynics
the way ice creates a frost heave in a New England road.

Amanda climbs tall on her knees,
leaning over the back
of her seat, declaring:

You LOOOOVE him.
       I do NOT.
Prove it, kiss Keith.
       No, that’s dumb
                    you’re dumb

I grit through
my teeth,

I read books
from the bookshelves at home
I know
I’m not supposed to read.
Medical dictionaries
and drug handbooks,
but they’re colorful
I think I understand them,
and as a result
of television, I know that
kissing leads to love
and love leads to sex,
which leads to babies,
which leads to the reproductive organs
releasing
something called semen
which has sperm which
fertilizes the egg
forming a zygote in the mom
and that’s how babies are made - so nyah.

Keith sits behind me, 
crosslegged sideways

his hands in his lap
a blonde buzzed
little Casanova
missing a front tooth
but that smile still killed
the old volunteers
patrolling the lobby
corralling children
into buses
bound for neighborhood
corners where eager
parents waited.

Chicken. Bock bock bock bock baaaaaa-

and before
she could finish her last
“bock”
I move,
jumping across the aisle
lips already
puckered

there will be first-grade
hell to pay, I know but

I make contact
with his cheek
in a henpeck - so maybe I was chicken,
at least a bit -
and there is silence
except for the sound of blood
pounding up my throat,
past the frayed collar of
my Power Rangers shirt
flushing my face with rose, and

the echo of cold autumn wind
whistling like the bus driver
through the cracks 
in the windows.

Ars Poetica in the Real World

“Wherever I am / I am what is missing” - Mark Strand
 


I collect poetry like the archivist of an unfunded museum,
                  or like an old woman with a house full of Russian nesting dolls
                  each one stuffed inside the other, waiting for a child to come into the sitting-room
                  and find glee in opening each one.

Words are as valuable as a helium balloon with a thin ribbon tied in a bow
                  around a child’s wrist or the boot thumps of a coal miner on his own front steps
                  the appalachian peak behind him slowly stripped away by corporate interest
                  and the echoes of communities crying out in protest
Language is flexible - a path carved through deciduous forests with machetes
                  and axes and it moves through the sky, mimicking the top-down satellite

                  aerial photography and mapped-out shots of urban sprawl,
                  Chicago or Boston’s chaos, New York’s methodical blocks

Metaphors are chosen to live in each moment, like smoke rings released
                  from the tongue - they expand and grow as they drift away,
                  finally dissipating and becoming a part of the atmosphere

Patterns exist in everything, in the complex structures of interconnectivity,
                  in the circuitry of a computer’s memory card and the highway interchange cloverleaf
                  where drivers tend to merge without looking.

Caution, Turtles

The twenty-something strut from my car
to the hospital-esque front door of my grandmother’s apartment
is long, lonely, and I miss my grandmother’s split level with its
marigold yellow siding and shared driveway
and the tree in the back that scattered red berries
that stained the bottom of my new white sneakers
without fail every year

​

after the first day of school.

 

I miss the millions of cans of Chef Boyardee
and Spagehettios I must have ingested over years
doing homework and colored pencil drawings
because crayons always drove me crazy.

​

I miss the short walks we took to the Brooks Pharmacy
across Route 5 and she bought me some crappy toy -
a bag of army men, a hi-bounce ball, baseball cards,
a butterfly yo-yo that I never learned to sleep
or do around-the-world because I was afraid
I’d clock myself square in the face.

​

I miss Monday mornings when I was off from school
but my parents weren’t off from work, and my grandmother
took me to her hairdressers, where she sat under those
dome dryers that looked – and still look - to me
like alien brain-scanners. I’d wait in a salon chair,
spinning endlessly as I tried to focus on the book
I was supposed to read.

​

I miss the summer naps on her lap waiting for my dad
in the sitting room of that split level, with the 70s shag
carpet that had never been cleaned since I came home
and the floral printed blue couch where we sat. She read.
I slept. The sun streamed through the bay window
and her non-book-hand lightly scratched my shoulder
with her lengthy fingernails, one always broken from some
“damn it!” accident in the kitchen, or replacing batteries.

​

I miss her making “poor-man milkshakes”
a half a can of Coke into a half-glass
of skim-milk, and I sipped the sweet combination
of fake sugar and ultra-pasteurization as I clunked
down the stairs kid-like, on my way to watch
Judge Judy and Bill Nye the Science Guy on full-blast
because my grandfather refused to use hearing aids.

I can’t walk up the stairs to her second floor
apartment without tasting that unique creamy fizz
again in my mouth
 
and one day,
bounding up rubbered stairwell with wet soles
I slipped, felt my ribs hit corner, felt my wrist
crack on the railing, I righted myself

​

and sat alone on the top stair and cried
into my hands until my eyes almost burst
the stairwell and my sobs echoing
with the guilt of not visiting for weeks

​

I pulled my hound’s-tooth Wayfarer
knockoffs over my eyes, stood up
and took each step back down with caution
walked coolly back through the lobby,
stared down at my Chucks

I wondered if the grandmothers in their armchairs
sitting, waiting long in the lobby
could feel the gravity pulling toward me
as I stepped outside, looked up at her window
swore past the ashtray still smoking under
the eave hanging above the front doors.

​

I crawled back into my car
and drove away, my eyes darting
around and I noticed the sign
that read “Caution, Turtles.”

​

I’ve never seen any turtles
up here.

 

About the Author

Katie Eber is a graduate of Fairfield University's MFA program. Her work won the Charles C. Wise Poetry Contest as an undergraduate at Roanoke College and has appeared in Hobo Pancakes, MadHat Lit, Quail Bell Magazine, DASH, White Stag, Garbanzo Literary Journal and Spry Literary Journal. Katie lives in the shadow of the Metacomet Ridge in central Connecticut, is the current poet laureate of Wallingford, and enjoys good beer, good music, and good sandwiches.

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