Jean Theron
For Your Situational Awareness
I cried hard this week, but my laugh/cry ratio
has performed well overall. As has
yours, I hope. Please forgive the formality,
I play dress-up only to confuse the dog.
Shall we now refer to the following chart?
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Some say that the wild rumpus has begun—
their words, not mine—yet others
are circumspect. Like robins in the grass,
they slip away in silent flutter,
the most socially awkward of songbirds.
A wise sunbeam said, “Times are hard.
Computers are everywhere.”
Another luminary says strip club profits
mirror the volatility index.
As usual, I’m as puzzled as the dog.
Look, I don’t understand the machines
buying and selling at ferocious
increments, but they know nothing
of robins in the grass. Like zombies
all they do is obey their bad screenwriting.
I’m one to talk: Everyday I have to prove
I’m not a robot until I have my doubts.
Perhaps you’ve felt how shopping in a crash
can feel crudely patriotic, or how
you want anything to feel good, anything.
Waste Not, Want Not
An act of decadence, a vast emptiness,
a thing that we were taught never to do.
The remains of something unspeakable—
worse, unknowable—like a decoder ring
taken off a dead language, or all the cadence
of a singing corpse. Found buried under
any barren, uninhabitable land—strip mine,
graveyard, shopping mall—so long as earth
is paved in bitumen, so long as sunlight
bruises my eyes in this shadeless place.
A nowhere past utopia, the lure of neglect—
draw of time spent heedless, to no purpose.
Luxury’s crumpled afterlife, delicate garment
tightening and slackening, the way of skin,
flesh, bone—our loss and diminution,
our lavish ruin. Want by another name.
...
Unexpected flowers in the break room:
A dozen beautiful weeks without injury.
Hand swollen, I grasp a pen: Paper work
or penance. I’ve salvaged what I could—
retrieved coats, collected art, rescued books
and chairs to read them in. I’ve stood aside
when other people came to fish some need
from the stream. Go ahead, I said, all yours.
A mother, her child gazing from the stroller,
pulled clothing out of a heap, not her first
magic act, nor her last. Another life tries
us on and charms its way in. I smiled when
she showed off—Tada, a burgundy sweater.
Voila, a pair of jeans. Still, it hurts to watch
life clinging to life. I broke apart trying to
blink away my tears before anyone saw.
On my route, a séance in reverse—ghosts
of things past come looking for us, trailing
me back here: roses in a windowless room,
the TVs we can’t turn off, a row of lockers
emptied out like the day, picked clean.
Bonis Avibus, Malis Avibus
In their tumbling song, the return of spring
Spring in our ears, on a walk wound up with song,
we catch sight of two red-winged blackbirds
squawking to their posts, both of us wondering
if this is home, just a bit sentimental, yet stoic
should this not be the nest. Again, you prepare
for the worst because the best takes care of itself.
Familiar sight atop cattails, along soggy roadsides,
and on telephone wires, our guide says. Perched
on barbed wire, the streaky brown female could be
a spy disguised as a sparrow. Security questions only
ask your favorite color (every), but my favorite sound
is a sonation: the wing whistle of mourning doves.
...
I don’t have to tell you nothing looks more wrong
than a dead bird. Don’t have to write another poem,
overflowing its lines, or sing a swollen song, timbre
painted gray as gravestones. I did, however, write
a threnody for three billion dead songbirds. It goes
like this: Everything that shrieks sounds at once...
...larks, thrushes, swallows—disappearing as though
to spare us—cry out from nowhere, from everywhere.
Still, hope perches in the soul. Entire armies, whole
continents have lost to the little songbird that could.
The final sound is this: a grackle’s swish of stippled
feathers, iridescence rustling over its deep dark wings.
Jean Theron is a writer living in Washington, DC and works as a racial equity trainer with a national alliance of trainers and organizers. Theron's poems appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Minnesota Review, The Shore, and Harpur Palate, and are online at: jeandesireetheron.com.