Losing Peru

Damn.

I simply cannot leave Peru

for a single minute.

My mind wanders while armies mass in Brazil.

What demon’s spawn haunts this child?

Takes possession of the pure and wide-eyed

innocence of youth?

He’s already filled the borders

of Argentina beyond carrying capacity,

overloaded, overcrowded

with edgy militants.

I guessed (mistakenly, it seems)

that he’d give chase

as I led my people out of tyranny,

crossing the isthmus of Central America

on our way to freedom

in the United States.

But now, left back

in Peru to mind the store,

my friends stare down the barrels

of countless cannons.

And I can only look back

from my disastrous foray in the North,

and watch while the circling dogs close in,

growling, chewing up Peru,

and South America falls

to fascist rule.

Oh Jesus.

Now Ontario’s on the move

and Iceland’s ass is hanging out.

*       *        *       *       *       *       *       *

This poem goes back quite a few years. My writing has almost always been based on personal experiences and relationships. Only on rare occasion do I write a poem in which there's an overt focus on politics or greater social issues. This is not one of those poems. Let me digress for a moment just to say that I usually hope that I write poems based on my personal experiences in which greater truths, social commentary or commonalities between individuals do in fact exist, even in spite of my intentions and motivations in the writing. Then of course there's a poem like Losing Peru.

This poem first appeared on the now-defunct website The Fulcrum Online, an online companion to Hamline University's print literary journal, The Fulcrum. On the website, registered users were able to leave comments and questions regarding each published literary work and piece of visual art. Overall, the comments on Losing Peru were positive, though most readers assumed that the poem was some sort of commentary on political strife in the Americas. 

In fact, one Christmas morning back when my son was young he received the board game Risk: The Game of Global Domination as a gift. He and I played the game that afternoon. He won. I wrote this poem just after my unconditional surrender.

Previously published at The Fulcrum Online and Snakeskin number 151.

Butling Mrs. Goldberg

I put Sanka on the serving tray,

choose a spoon from the hoard

the hag’s collected in a drawer,

pull a sheet of Bounty and fold in thirds.

I rest my load on her threadbare chair.

Mrs. Goldberg’s kitchen range is limited,

being of its time (c. 1950).

Still, it chugs on like a steam engine,

warming the cold kettle, tics and sighs.

I can certainly wait, I mean, my god,

I’ve been on permanent pause

since she fell in the flower bed,

and cracked her pelvis

as she ended the perennials.

She cried out, and

I said I’m here for you, Miss.

I’m here.

I wipe my eyes with a kerchief,

straighten bowtie and peer at face creases

reflected in toaster sheen

while the teakettle screams.

I creak back up to weary feet

and fill her mug with searing steam.

Hoisting the tray, I shuffle the long hall,

the shining foyer. I climb the endless stair.

Outside her bedroom door,

my knuckles hang in the air.

I brace against the maddening repetitions.

(Ah? Who is it?

Well, who the hell could it be, old woman?)

I clear my throat

…bought smile

…gentle knock.

Miss?

Miss?

First published in The Fulcrum Online 2005-2006, ed. 1

Eggs Etc.

I hear her clear her throat

just as I sit down in the restaurant with my daily news and hangover.

I recognize that sound, like a polite ghost in a cartoon

drawing Shaggy from a Scooby-snack and I scan the room.

And there she sits. Looking at me

with wide eyeholes and crooked smile

the same way she did when we kissed a while back

in Dinkytown, between the parked cars on 4th St.

while buses blew force fields to shield us

from the eyes of the fidelity police. Even before

I returned to the house that day

she was already taxiing down the runway, bag under seat

filled with her Dramamine, diaphragm  and Eurail pass.

We said no goodbye on 4th, though it was implied

and only later confirmed from some phone box in London.

Now, here I am with a hankering for coffee and eggs

and greasy beast meat and there’s something

that brought her back to the States and this same nasty diner

where she and I liked to eat after screwing in the sunbulb of dawn.

She’s still like that photo from my brainpan

but crossed with a catcher’s mitt and I know

there’s more to me than there once was,

but all that seems secondary when I find that she and I

are not only in the same country again, but even

within spitting distance. Then,

the waitress is at my table slopping coffee

into a mug and asking What’ll it be, hon?

I think it’s clear that I came here only for the eggs,

but her muffin sure looks good too.

I don’t know what to say.

First published in Thieves Jargon

Green

I’ve a billowed even ill-spent smudgepot

near where the fishes let opaque tresses

loaf in the foxglove pith. Many marionéts,

steeped in caprice, may dance on taut string and given rein

feast on your wife’s dowry, slurp up the last

of your stew while she’s lying in her bath, lip-sippling

her third absinthe with warm water sluice at the fleshiers. 

Even I ease past your foyer swags and with a spongy tissue

lining the rind, tip the clay baby upon its drooling snout.

Unlike a foolish bridegroom eager for his flick of the delicate,

I coax out the maisonette with a swaying chamber pot,

squiggles for stitch in the plumb, while close-eyed,

my lashes slack flan as though under acid wax press

and seeming my freckled blessing skew. I cub the brass

back against the harder pew. Swaddled. My purer self

backslid into layers of woolen clothes while below

the shifting surface your wife’s submerged, naked,

shy, wide-eyed and so ill consider. Lip blue. You, black

of core and perched high over lurched and harried hoofbeat,

I’ll breathe the life back past your wife’s glaucous sores.

First published in Ditch

Lemon Poppyseed

Wiindigo’s on the move, foraging

for roots   berries   meats.

Young Ojibwe children

huddle wideeyed as elders tell

legends of the creature that walks the winter wood.

The mass of manmonster comes from the cold

when Minnesota’s Moon of Crusty Snow is

near halfpast, and Spring is still

being beaten back by biting cold.

Twigs and dryreeds glaze in drizzlefreeze.

And the hairy man comes.

The drum and flute that haunts reservation winters

crescendos early, followed by

the drawnout tinkling of shattered glass

scattering across a frozen lake.

Nourishment for wild creatures grows scarce.

Cold morning, thatched fog, crows steaming upon posts.

Wiindigo tromps from the deep wood,

crosses the meadow and enters the Indian village.

Iced walks are greased glass, and pedestrians

don’t trust their mukluks, should they need to run.

Wiindigo crouches in shadow, tumrumbling.

Sharp smell seeps from a Caribou on every corner,

hissing espresso for the queued crowds.

First published in I Was Indian: An Anthology of Native Literature

Meleed the Jams

Like the leaking 

honeybucket 

in content 

imperious bliss,

we sacrifice

mingle rug 

to hush,

fray nervous edge,

silken undulants,

puckered enclave,

dissipate calm surrounds, 

and melee plums 

onto disable 

plate.

     Slump.

Fill a tray with cake.

         Slithe. 

*               *               *

First published in Venereal Kittens, 2008

The Haunted Theatre

Digging for Roots in the Woods

            We had been fasting for several days by the time we left Minneapolis. We drove straight through the three hours between home and the woods of north central Wisconsin. Babs noted that she could appreciate the fasting used by the Indians; she felt so pure and clean. I didn’t tell her that I was beginning to have slight visual hallucinations brought on by the lack of nutrients in my body. I knew that the shimmering butterflies in the car were most likely not real, and I recalled references to such occurrences in my Native American studies at the Hennepin County library near my apartment. Even the books written over a hundred years ago had explained how purification rituals are important in Ojibway culture for people seeking visions and trying to connect to the spiritual side of life.

            Our first glimpse of Indian country was with the eyes of outsiders. When we finally crossed over onto the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibway reservation, we saw our first bilingual sign announcing Wiisinii-adaawewigamig - Grocery Store. We noted, too, that the reservation roads could be called paved only by a generous redefining of the word. Despite Babs' excitement, I felt that our chance of finding any sort of meaningful experience was dubious. We had grown up without any sense of our Indian roots, both of us feeling the void. Back in Minneapolis, Babs had suggested that we might try our reservation. Now that we had made it, however, it felt like theirs and not ours.

            Driving through the woods, we followed a maze of arrows to a little business district. There was the Indian Community College. All orange brick and shiny glass, it could have been transplanted from any community campus. There were a few social services buildings leftover from the Work Projects Administration of the 1940s. There was even a small radio station with a stylized eagle painted on the window. The grocery store was little and in need of a thorough cleaning; it was probably not the pride of the Red Owl Corporation.

            The two of us being fresh from the world of academia, the college seemed the obvious choice. We were greeted by a receptionist. Babs and I stammered, but couldn’t find the words to explain our purpose. The receptionist directed us to have a look around, thinking that we were prospective students. We wandered up and down the two hallways, florescent lights buzzing above us while competing scents of Pine-Sol and burnt sage struggled for dominance. We stole glances through the door windows at classrooms full of dark-skinned students. No white majority on the rez. We gathered a collection of quizzical looks from both students and faculty. We read every message board on campus, but found no clue as to our next course of action. We left.

            The sun was slowly rounding overhead. We felt lost, so we went to buy a package of tax-free Camels. I was dragging hard on one before we left the wiisinii-adaawewigamig. Next we explored the other buildings, pressing more than once through the same line of Indians awaiting Welfare checks. We even found time to take a tour of the one room radio station, where they were helpful enough to give us pencils emblazoned with the WOJB call letters.

            By late afternoon we were tired and white. We found ourselves whiter than we had ever been in our lives. Babs and I sat in the car deciding whether or not to give up on our quest for both familial connection and the sense of spiritual belongingness. Despite cursory conversations we had had with several people, we remained reluctant to even attempt to explain the vague reason for our having come to this increasingly foreign land.

            Babs was ready to hit the Red Owl for Little Debbies, and head for Minneapolis. “We’re never going to see any of these people ever again,” I told her, “so why don’t we at least try one last time? We’ll go back into the college and try to explain what we’re looking for.” I figured that even if we sounded like idiots, we could leave knowing that we had truly given it a shot.

            The receptionist greeted us with mild disdain. We were, after all, bothering her for a second time in one single afternoon. Babs and I rapidly spilled our story of spiritual searching and living as minorities in a white world. The receptionist helped us to feel that we belonged in that place from which we had traveled. “You people come here expecting to find Indians in teepees. If you had called ahead, we could have arranged something.”

            With red faces, we apologized and started to leave. She stopped us. A heavyset man with the face of a happy and gentle child was standing in the doorway. The receptionist told us to talk to Zaa’igaaning. The large Indian man listened to our story while sipping coffee, nodding slightly and smiling. We spoke for some time, learning from Zaa’igaaning that many generations back, three brothers at the reservation had started distinct family lines. Babs and I were of one line, and our new friend was, in fact, our distant cousin. Excited by that revelation, we were only slightly disappointed when he told us that at the reservation all people are cousins. We laughed. Eventually he suggested that we follow his minivan out to the woods where Chejauk was working.

            As it was still early in the season for making maple syrup, Chejauk was out at the new sugarbush site putting up wigwams and chopping firewood. We drove down ice and snow covered trails in the woods while following Zaa’igaaning. I began to notice the handmade taps pounded into the occasional tree. Very soon the air would be thick with the sweet smell of maple sap simmering in twenty-gallon drums. We stopped where a red handkerchief was tied on a birch. From there we went on foot.

            Chejauk was a longhaired man with thin wisps of facial hair. He spoke in a thick Ojibway accent, which has a unique rhythm and excludes anything similar to an R sound, as it was unheard by tribe members until only the latest few generations. We didn’t explain ourselves to Chejauk. He was quite happy to have extra hands to do the work, and he quickly set us to the task. Babs and I cut down young ironwood trees and stripped the few branches while Chejauk made holes in the ground following a large oval design. We inserted the lodge poles, bending opposite sides across to each other in arches while Chejauk and Zaa’igaaning tied them together with rope. We pulled blue tarps over the dome-shaped wigwam frames, as Chejauk’s grandfather had done with birch bark years earlier. Chejauk was happy that the work went so much faster having four Indians instead of two. Zaa’igaaning agreed.

            That afternoon turned into night. On breaks from working to prepare the sugarbush site we would warm ourselves around a fire and sip tea that Zaa’igaaning had made in a coffee can with melted snow and red willow sprigs. Chejauk told us stories about Winiibozho, the Ojibway spirit entity who permeates our tribe’s oral history.

As the night wound down, Babs and I exchanged looks of concern. We had no plan for where to stay, and we didn’t even know if there were hotels in the area. Zaa’igaaning had been assuming all evening that we’d stay with him. He took us back to his house in the reservation town where he lived with his wife. We slept on the shag carpet in the family room.

We stayed with our new friends for an additional week. Babs and I broke our fast on the second day in town. We fell into the rhythms of Ojibway life on the reservation: gathering berries, making birch bark baskets, walking in the woods, and meeting people at the casino for burgers. Zaa’igaaning introduced us to many other cousins.

On our last afternoon before returning to Minneapolis, Chejauk wanted to take me and Babs out to see a wild ginseng plant that he had found in the woods. He insisted that the ginseng is a rare occurrence, and that the root is strong medicine. We followed him through what felt like miles of dense forest, our boots sponging into the layered ground with every step. Chejauk laughed, telling us, “It seems like a long way to go for a root. Maybe it’s enough just to know that it’s there.”

          

*               *               *               *               *               *

Events from early spring 1993.

First published in Yellow Medicine Review, Fall 2007.

Poésie Noire

Bits gleaned from atop the powdered rungs

and doll tongues strung upon a braided cord clasped

between folds of frilly frue, you come

in the night wrapped in ermine and brooch

over fetching skirt, and you’re tippled on the putty,

and I’d sure dig it, but not so go and such tomorrow:

your face mashed and snorgled, perfect shroud

of your makeup layer permanently Turinning my pillow slip,

eggs flipped over my frypan and my sizzled sausage

already sorted like two stacks of cordwood

dumped from the truck and claimed right there

by a hungry pair of lumber barons. Then me,

apron in the kitchenette, my eggs on the plate

getting cold while you proof and yodel under my shower hose,

juice from a sliced orange creeping your plate

and sogging up your toast while I expect the sound

of your bus at the corner. I’d climb into a barrel

of slowboil tar and leaf through the complete works

of Jacques Derrida as I wait for the slow dissolve.

Still, I’m no Marlowe and you’re less Dietrich

than I’d have you be, no femme fatale echoing pumps

down the wooden hall outside my office door.

You just came in the night a bit better for wear.

I’ll feed you my eggfry though you’d like the hardboil,

and by light of day I’ll drive you home in my Packard

with benchseat and rear-projection stock footage. 

*               *               *               *

Poésie Noire started out with some free form word associations, basically 
just playing with words. Powdered rungs, doll tongues, braided cord, etc. 
I like the way the phonemes roll around and create some bizarre images. 
By the time we reach ermine, brooch and skirt, there's more of a narrative 
thread appearing. There's a reference to the Shroud of Turin, then eggs. 
Again with the eggs. Eggain. The egg is an image that appears in my poems 
off and on over the years. I've always been a fan of a healthy yolk, not to 
mention the gooey thing that umbilicals the wet to the shell sac. Eggs are 
sensual and reproductive. Eggs are pure. They may have come before the 
chicken, but that hasn't yet been definitively determined. Eggs are a delicious, 
moist and protein-rich snack contained within a crust. The exterior is 
simultaneously fragile and incredibly strong and resilient. If you put a raw 
egg into a vinegar bath and leave it soaking for a few days, all the calcium 
leeches out of the shell, turning it clear as glass and opening the mystery of 
the interior's goings-on. Despite the richness that causes me some belly pain, 
I like Hollandaise sauce drizzled generously over Eggs Benedict. Or omelets. 
When we were kids, my sisters and I were about to enjoy omelets for dinner. 
Bubby brought her plate into the living room and placed it on a chair in order 
to stake her claim. She went back into the kitchen to get her beverage. When 
she returned, she sat on her omelet.

There was an oddly spiritual kung fu movie called Circle of Iron / The Silent Flute. 
It starred David Carradine as a blind kung fu master / flautist who mentors an 
aspiring martial artist on a quest for knowledge. At one point the "apprentice" 
is crossing a desert wasteland, and he encounters Eli Wallach in oil, trying to 
dissolve away the lower half of his body after numerous vows of chastity had 
failed. The reference to Jacques Derrida is about that deconstruction of one's 
sexuality and mobility.

The rest of the poem is heavily flavored by film noir imagery, and how both 
the poem's speaker and the overnight guest fail to measure up to that ideal. 
On a slightly more optimistic note, the poem concludes with the speaker 
embracing both the film noir ideal and the inherent pretense of the genre 
(and poetry by association?).

First published in 

Naugatuck River Review, Summer 2009

Sweetstormchild

Been dipped in the rainbarrel

as I settle back, beer

in hand, feet raised to relief.

Son’s soft snoring

seeps down from upstairs.

My mind, couched and beery,

pictures Storm in his pjs

with his gorilla collection and pillow-pile.

Along with local news

splayed out before me, I spy glasses

left, lenses lined with dried cry.

He’s a shaman, a spell caster,

       having resurrected faces

of the recently deceased

       from the daily paper

             with tears and pink putty.

*               *               *               *

An oldie... 

I worked in restaurants for years, mostly as a line cook. My wife and I worked opposite schedules so that one of us was always home with our son, Storm. I went to work in the evenings, closed down the kitchen at the restaurant, and came home around midnight. Usually, my family was sleeping when I got home. 

This one night, I arrived home, opened a cold beer and sat down on the couch to relax. After being on my feet all night and cooking hamburgers for what felt like a thousand hungry customers, the beer and couch were a refreshing Ahhh. I could hear the steady breathing of my sleeping family upstairs, though nobody actually snores (right Donna?). I thought of Storm, who at the time slept with a pillow pile and a number of stuffed gorillas to sort of nest himself for security (though that's long ago, right Storm?). Storm's glasses were on the coffee table and the lenses had dried tears. I wondered what had occurred earlier in the evening while I was at work. 

The rest of the poem draws on a slightly earlier image. Storm had been playing with Silly Putty and lifting images from the newspaper, which he would then stretch and pull. At one point he turned to the obituaries page just to get some more faces. It was that idea of Storm resurrecting deceased people through his childhood play, and how that seemed like such a spiritual and shamanistic occurrence that was the impetus for this poem. 

I put the two poem ideas into a single narrative. I like this poem as an example of my approach to poetry at that time. It's very linear and direct, as compared with my current writing style, which is more like "Hydrocodone" and "At Back Stair" below.

First published:

THE FULCRUM: LITERATURE AND ARTS JOURNAL, Volume 9 Spring 2006

and on the related website

http://www.fulcrumonline.org

Hydrocodone

   Moonpie and mumbly peg. Numb to dock-sound

with mumenshantz on a quicktime loop. I’ve a sasquatch thumb

   in a felt bag with a drawstring cord. Lord, lay your sweaty palm

upon my tenderer and grunt a holy wyrd. Balls black

   huge heavy. Crotch jockey smuggling bowling sphere

through customs’ drooping lid, ricket-legged. Someone struck me

   with a candlestick in my pantry. I in paper, wake later dazed

and shaved, have been shiv-stuck and sorted, junk knocked about

   and volcano pathway tied in a not. Though hurt in pankey sack

expand to suit the wooly thumble. Fortunate I was to rise,

   writhe, day to lay and pill bottle in grubbed-out clutch.

*               *               *                *

I had surgery on an inguinal hernia. Now that was a fun time. (Click here for photos!) I wrote this poem the next day while packed in ice, swollen, feeling battered and bruised, swimming on painkillers, and generally zoned out. The first several lines were meant to capture the sort of mumbling surrealism that I experienced at the time. I don't remember why I was watching mumenshantz videos on YouTube, but it's a strangely fitting image for my state of mind and a jarring example of my drug-induced stupor. I was eating a moonpie at the time, and thinking that it would be a good time to play mumbly peg, due to the painkillers. Somewhat random images, but they were of the moment and captured the hernial zeitgeist.

The first image that preceded the poem was the sasquatch thumb. I love the word sasquatch. Having her or his thumb, I thought, would be a strangely wonderful trophy, while still being bizarre, like carrying a rabbit's foot as a charm. Plus, the thumb would be physical proof of the existence of the creature without being enough of the creature to actually prove anything. If I had one I would carry it with me in a little bag and show it to curious onlookers. What does it have to do with the hernia poem? Well, that's up to the curious onlooker to decide. (BTW, did you click there?)

Bowling ball imagery... yes.

This poem first appeared in the third edition of Jessy Randall's short-run 'zine, 

The Huge Underpants of Gloom
http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall/

It is published online in the Canadian journal,

ditch, the poetry that matters
http://www.ditchpoetry.com/jamesdautio.htm

At Back Stair

Lead you to the empty room, paste

             grim ace upon the rack,

talk of fish spoon in the pantry sack.

Like you, I just want l'oven,

            c'est les autres, and

slump loose from the pomple noose.

That back stair is string and winds

            piltdown from the amberbach,

dribbled from the honeycove and built

to resin with hard visage

            intact. You’ve a hand

in my larder. I’m plagued

by such scenes and heights, tread worn

            smooth to the tipple edge,

riser hide a black and tan.

Drawn. In bas de l'escalier sans

            Suess soul, nevertheless

absolute and elsewhere. The blinder

bite abate in lined slicker, hat brimmed

            in narrow and frizzed

in drizzle. It seems that

mayhap doppelgänger be my me

            knew by.

Now I wrap in mac at the corner lamp.

I’ve poison the child, turn

                        and key.

*           *           *           *

The title "At Back Stair" refers to several things for me. For a short while in my childhood I lived in a house on Baxter Avenue in Superior, WI. In this poem, I'm letting my mind wander around at Baxter. I was pretty young when we stayed there, and my memories are vague, so when I was working on this poem, I talked to family members who helped to fill in some gaps. There was a back stairway down into the basement. I remember the stairs, but didn't until I was reminded. In an even more convoluted way, my brain is accessing distant memories, sensations and fears from a far off time, like opening the back door to a place one hasn't visited in a long while, but which still seems intimately familiar. What I seem to be visiting in this poem is my childhood, and those things that helped make me who I am as an adult.

Off the kitchen at Baxter was an old pantry with unusually high ceiling and shelves. Like you I just want l'oven. This is meant to imply both wanting loving as all people do, and also wanting the oven, a la Sylvia Plath. Also, in the Sartre play No Exit, the protagonist comes to realize that "Hell is other people," or rather, "L'enfer, c'est les autres." The remainder of the stanza sounds like a mishmash image: suicide by hanging, but slumping loose suggests being released, but is it too late, and where the hell does the indie band Pomplamoose come from? Is that a grapefruit?

The next image seems complex, but what it feels like to me is an acknowledgement that the memories and experiences from Baxter and childhood in general really exist only as a relic of the past, or a treasure encased in amber, an opportunity for wealth of discovery. I realize that's a stretch, but I had very little overall purpose in mind while writing this poem. For me, the joy comes from discovering what is happening here, why it's happening, and what it tells me about myself. The surface is about language play and layering images. The "you" in my larder in that stanza could be directed toward family, self, childhood memory, or the amber nugget.

In the next stanza we're back to the physical: the back stairs at Baxter, the treads of which were worn and old even back in the 1970s when I lived there. My mom reminded me that there were a lot of bugs in the basement, and here at least, the bugs are black and tan beetles, and represent the dangers and fears of either childhood itself, or revisiting childhood from a later perspective.

The next French suggests to me being drawn back down the old stairs, despite the potential dangers and lacking the purity of the child's soul (yes indeed, Dr. Suess). As we transition to the next stanza with hat, slicker, and drizzle, I'm once again an adult. Maybe there's a double of me out there somewhere. Maybe my childhood experiences are another James independent of the adult me. Whatever. I'm back outside the house and down at the corner, standing in the drizzle. I pull my coat up around me, giving myself a hug as I turn to go. The child may now be poisoned, or maybe I have poison for the child, it's unclear though either way it doesn't sound like a positive. 

Key? I have a key in hand? A car key? Or I'm returning to the house? Is the key a key to understanding something? In which case, does the poem end on a positive note? Key seems to be a verb as used here. What could it mean? I'm not sure, though again, I absolutely love the richness of exploration that undergirds this sort of poem. Good or bad, at least I key.

First published in:

ditch, the poetry that matters 

http://www.ditchpoetry.com/jamesdautio.htm

The Zoo

    Congregation and Communion

            Back at the room, bare

            except for where I’d nailed Christ

            to the wall, we debated

            the holy word in jubilance

            fortified by drink.

            But in the ennui and boredom it brought,

            we created the church            and its steeple

with only our clumsy paws.

            Later, loaded, and no longer limited

            by tactile sensation,

            we set off seeking fulfillment

            in the afterhours haze of a nearby zoo.

            We scaled the fence

            as monkeys chittered

            and snakes sang in the moonglow.

            Like animals, we ran amok,

            calling out to each other in the dark.

            We thought to search for something nunlike.

            When we found it we formed a line,

            each of us taking a turn

            spanking the penguin

            on her warm, velvet bottom.

            

*          *          *          *          *

This poem goes back nearly 10 years. My friends and I would sometimes go to the Como Zoo in St. Paul in the middle of the night. There was a wolf pen close to the parking lot. We could see the wolves padding around inside the pen, watching us over their shoulders, but apprehensive about getting too close to us. We would get down on our hands and knees next to the fence and knead the ground with our front paws and the wolves would come right up to the other side of the fence, inches away, and sniff us. Sometimes they'd knead the ground with their front paws as well.

This poem is fairly direct and true to life at that time. Did my friends and I actually queue up to spank the penguin? While I'm reluctant to openly admit to any wrongdoing, let's just say that the event was not without the penguin's approval.

First published:

The Rapids Review, Spring 2004

http://webs.anokaramsey.edu/english/RapidsReviewSpring%202004OnlineVersion.pdf