Deedee lit a cigarette, rippled her lips in full
snake hustle with just a hint of millipede crawl,
rang out her disgust, “These eggs are hepatitis!
That ain’t yellow, that’s disease! Why the hell…”
And with that, she lifted hard into grimy cafe air,
big knees banging red formica loud as careless
furniture movers who air drop heavy cabinets
the final 3 inches, bruising kneecaps instantly
from the way the table was bolted to the floor
to keep regular drunks steady at 2 a.m. exits,
her smoke hung on her lip as if afraid of heights,
then jumped. Yes, she straightened right out,
a puppy held by its neck, her face a signature
of nuclear shock, twisty carnival front facade
to the tunnel of crazy fear, dripping paralysis
of the impossible come anew, how it can’t be
for life as we’ve secured it, life bound tight
as a calf for branding. Remember our lack
of language to describe some moments? Er,
Deedee does, pinned to nothing but the air!
Who knows what it was—our unforetold—
unlike scientists on TV who tell us calmly
when we’re all going to die and why, which
we ignore because it’s all sensible to death.
Damned? Tell us something we don’t know.
Maybe it was a conflux of anger and planets
and the timewave counting down to zero,
as many said it was. Maybe she’s a witch
who failed to ever reconcile DNA secrets
with a Central Valley cotton farm upbringing.
Maybe Deedee’s aura went all anti-gravity
on her over the sorry condition of her eggs.
Maybe such flight has always been possible
and all we lacked was jet engines of faith.
It was an inexplicable thing for diner eyes tired
already from all their sole memories of pavement
walked each day like a road built by ancestors,
and the grinding strife that serves as the view—
little money and no love plastered everywhere,
construction sites, telephone poles and bustops…
until Deedee cracked her head on that ceiling!
It announced just how asleep everyone’s been!
The crowd stayed screwed down still, a trick
of modern times, to act as if nothing happened.
You could just as easily announce 10,000 dead
in a Hutu uprising, or 20,000 dead through spring
in another sub-Saharan famine, or kids killed
each week in Iraq, and you’d get this reaction:
Look down, look away, it’s God stuff, ordained,
a done deal long before any of us were born.
The turmoil and terror we deserve. We ask
for it, or at least, we ask for nothing else. And
one more thing, the eggs weren’t all that bad.
It’s just that people blow up for some reason.
Chrome Press 