The Poetry Kit |
| David Somerfleck | |||
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"The Apocryphal Pill"
It's crisp. You can easily smell fresh menthol pine, wild onions, dew, bird-excrement sitting in moist, neat little brown round mounds for feet to slide across their face, just-cut grass, and plenty of animals. The cool, steady winds taste like the sensation of churning a rich milkshake in and out of your cheeks. The birds are noisier than usual, so it'll likely rain soon. Poppa laughs and scratches himself. I tag along. Home is wherever and whenever it is now. In the back of his neck I see the sidewalk, with all its cracks and winding grooves. In his heavy eyes I see a thousand tiny and red arms reaching a singular blue jewel that is simply too darting to be caught by such small fingers. His hair is like a mat of dying grass by the sidewalk's side; it looks as if it's ready to surrender to time, but you have to kick it damn hard to loosen it at all. He buys me a PEZ dispenser and a lemonade for himself. "Watch," he says, sucking the drink into his face like a trumpeter and spitting it at all the baboons. I ask why their asses look like disgraced rainbows. He only swallows and spits at them again. He turns to me when they start spitting and urinating back. Frustrated, he shouts at them something obscene in Russian and throws his cup between the cage bars. They start urinating in it and we, slowly, start toward the goat farm. Seizing a breath in through flared nostrils, I hold it in my chest, tasting it, turning it like a new marble. |
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