{I swear I am going to donate an electric fan to this place}

I keep forgetting people actually read this ungodly indulgent journal. everything's fine, I just never think to post when I'm in a good mood.

was hoping to write something cheerful today, got ridiculous instead, but so it goes. got a copy of Southern Poetry Review in the mail, which means I must have entered their contest last year and lost. the poems in this magazine are, for the most part, incredibly innocuous. must look back at the spreadsheet to see what on earth I thought might win.

so I don't write enough poetry "of the moment," which is so popular now. here's today's attempt.

it’s cooler out back, but the view from here is priceless
a Williamsburg tale

nothing extraordinary about the orange kangaroo
outside the 30-minute photo shop that also sells
lotto tickets and (if you know who to ask for)
highly decent pot. the fluorescent kangaroo plays,
for a quarter, she’ll be coming ‘round the mountain
when she comes. a song adapted by mountaineers
from a so-called negro spiritual, now played
by a fiberglass kangaroo ridden by a pink-shirted
Dominican four-year-old while her mother
plays the lotto with the numbers of her dead
grandmother’s birthday, the year she came here,
and one based on that dream with the pigeons.
of course I made up the part about the pot,
the kangaroo's saddle is empty, and the t-shirted
four-year-old who might also be Puerto Rican
just leaned in the door of this coffeeshop, lured
perhaps by the silver mannequin tilted to display
its broken hip before her mother, maybe on her way
to play lotto or buy groceries or whatever
mothers do on hot Saturday afternoons, stopped
to call her with a Spanish not of my high school
and the tone common to all mothers of the curious
which I was, always wandering off, my mother says,
saying every time I was found again, I just wanted
to see, but it’s true about the song the kangaroo
repeats with her mescaline eyes and tempting
red seat, it spread to the railroad men
in the Midwest and now nobody remembers
the words to When the Chariot Comes.


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