If I look back over the April poems I've pushed out daily over the past three years, I'll see an obsession with the shit weather. More often than not, winter comes back with its dry heaves in April, squeezing us in a gastric fist until we want to vomit ourselves. There's a puke of snow still on the lawns and though the sun's shining it's frigid outside. I've had at least a cup and a half too much of coffee, and am stuck in a kind of emotional fugue state where nothing seems quite right. I want to run outside and jog around the block (and that's saying something -- I can't run; this knock-kneed body doesn't take well to it); I want to sit on the couch forever and give up exercising for the rest of all time. I'm not sure what I should be doing. I only know it's not this.
And then I remember that I'm supposed to write a poem a day. Ugh. I've already done the vagina and the cat. The two big pussy poems. What else is there?*
Here's today's prompt: Write about the first time you did something. I found it here.
Rollercoaster Ride
I'm nine and we're at Lake Ponchartrain Park. It's the year we spend
in New Orleans, or in Metairie, a "sabbatical year," something I don't
understand at nine, except that it's hot here, and chameleons infest
the backyard, and we're living in a house that belongs to another family,
sleeping in their beds, sitting on their chairs, like Goldilocks with
fire arts and Bermuda grass. I'm nine and we're standing in line for a
roller-coaster ride, and Mom will be my partner -- I barely clear the required
sign because I'm "short," and I look a few years behind, though my mind
in some ways has traveled years ahead, into a worrisome adolescence,
a strange emotional exile, as if I'm always slightly out of step. I'm nine
and now we're at the front of the line, and I feel a falling inside -- I want
to change my mind, I want to go back home -- but Mom says it'll be okay
and we buckle ourselves into the hard seat and the train lurches past its
small station, clacking up and up and up and up the hill, the falling inside
far too wide now, my head bobbing up off my neck, my brain frothing
with thoughts, and oh oh oh I want to get off as the car trembles to the top
and hangs hangs hangs then plummets down into the hell of black under
the lake, someone said we'd go under the lake, and his must be what happens
when you die, just up and up and then down into nothing, wooden track
shuddering and hacking under our seats, and I've stopped breathing only
I'm still screaming, and Mom'swarm body beside me tells me I'm still alive,
then up into the air again that's twilight with the start of another
Louisiana night, thick and throbbing with the chirr of insect life,
and again up into thin stars and the glitter of the far down lakewater
and I want off, I want to rewind the time, I want not to stand in a line
for this strange form of dying, but Mom holds my hand so I know I'm
stuck in a forward passage of time, still alive, and when at last we climb out
onto a ground that feels more asssertive and angry than before, pushing up to
smash my legs back into their chubby body, I feel familiar but changed, delivered
back whole but deeply uncertain: a little Yankee girl returned to this
steamy Southern city, nine and white and plump pigeon-toed flutter,
scared and sidelined in the screaming schoolyard, a flightless half-feathered
bird blown down from her impossible nest.
--
*Apparently, there are birds. I had no idea that the roller-coasters and memory would lead me to Pittsburgh pigeons.
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