Forty-Fifth Paradox Writing

Within a week of asking her out,

He spoke to me twice as much.

Then he sent a note with chocolate,

Saying he’s fallen for another girl.

I’ll write back, with a bottle of vanilla extract,

And say:

I am not your back up,

Your trump card,

Or Your booby prize.

Best of luck to your relationship,

You’ll be needing luck when she dumps you

for the next one.

Like all hospital waiting rooms, the staff had it painted a soft yellow, a comforting color for visitors inside. Cushy couches lined every wall, and divided the room in half, in case the visitors decided to war over their divided territory. Even at eight o’ clock at night a few visitors chattered away, not allowing the 2 ft lampshades a bit of rest. The lampshades continued to dampen the light, despite the fact that it hurt their eyes, eyes that peaked out from every tiny hole in the lampshades’ fabric. A child’s toy sat in boredom on one couch-side table; no child had played with it in months. Wisely the hospital had barred young visitors from this wing of the hospital, knowing how little children like to carry diseases in their cotton-lined pockets.

Any visitor sitting on the couches long enough would notice how strange the designer’s tastes were. White contact lens shaped lamps hanged from the ceiling, with black pupils at the bottom watching the visitor’s every move. Wooden shelves too narrow to hold books branched out from the far wall. Perhaps the decorator intended them to be windows, only to realize this wall only opened to the inside of the building, not the outside.

A desk and a door kept guard over the intensive care unit, scrutinizing each and every visitor that came their way. A slight groan in their wooden bodies indicated a yes, while two said  no. When a visitor didn’t past the unspoken test, the door would fail to open when a visitor pulled on his handle. By the time the visitor arrived with hospital help, the door would have already sent messages through the floor tiles to all the other doors to keep alert. So far no incidents had occurred to warrant summoning floor-wet signs in the closet, but the waiting door room and desk dutifully kept on watching. Two days before they had celebrated their two month anniversary, though no other piece of furniture could figure out what they had done two months earlier to warrant such an occasion.

A separate room had a television, a vending machine, and several more tables. The room was deceptively dark, because no one ever turned the lights on. Unsuspecting visitors would suppose the room to be quiet, when in fact the television seemed permanently set between two channels: one with 24 hour news casts in English, and the other with telenovas in Español. Two person tables kept each other company, still trying to both learn English and Spanish. (Both tables had been made in China, and they only understood Mandarin.) Newspapers kept the tables warm, and entertained visitors with the news when they dared.  Meanwhile the individually wrapped junk food in the vending machine watched the visitors nervously. They always hated whenever one visitor decided to purchase one of them, but no more than they hated being twisted by the coils and cruelly dropped to the dispenser without a thought. The junk food packages didn’t dare contemplate what awaited them on the other side of the glass.

I would drive as far as my gas tank would take me,

and then I would run the rest of the way,

until I reached the shores of Victoria.

I would gather each plant, each flower,

each piece of the Old World,

each rock, each government building,

each lamp, each iron-wrought lamp,

each cup of tea, each cube of sugar,

each drop of cream, each foreign accent,

each wink, each photo, each sigh,

every bewildered stare,

and gather them up in a bag,

just to see her smile again.

“I’m sorry Mr. Death, but Penny Jacobs isn’t in that room anymore.” Her eyes, brimming with innocence, stared back at his empty ones.

“Then who is?” Mr. Death sighed, smoothing his pale hair back. He could feel in his hands where this headed.

The nurse glanced at the open binder on her desk. “Pam Jacobs.  Completely different person Penny’s family says.”

Mr. Death, or Al, as he preferred to be called, rubbed his face wearily. (Angel O. Death tended to give people the wrong impression.) “You’re absolutely sure?”

The nurse twirled a blonde curl in her hand. “Absolutely.”

“Alright.” She half expected him to sigh in defeat, but he almost looked relieved. “You said there was somebody I should see in room 50?”

She flipped through her notebook, sliding her finger down to the appropriate name. “Yep, that’s the one.”

“Thank you.” As Al left, the nurse swore she saw his shadow linger longer than the others.

Waiting until Angel O. Death vanished around the corner, the nurse headed to “Pam” Jacobs room. The nurse sat in the chair next to the hospital bed and whispered “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but your husband was right.’

Every ring resounds like a drum roll,

as the receiver rubs against my cheek like a noose.

When the drum roll stops,

I hope to hear, not a present voice,

but a past voice, one that’s been recorded

between 5 and 20 seconds,

with  a brief message with an even briefer excuse,

asking for my name and phone number.

I hope you don’t actually answer with a hello,

with suppressed surprise.

In fact I hope this number has been mysteriously disconnected,

saving me from a potential conversation.

Dear Friends and Family,

We’d like to invite you to our wedding, but first we’d like to invite you to help pay for it. We don’t want your money, but we’d like your pop cans. You see, we’d like to turn in about 400,000 pop cans by July so we can pay for the ceremony. Hopefully we’ll see you on the 31st!

The future Geyers.

http://weddingcans.com./

PS: It’s green!

She has a photo album enshrining

her conquests over the past four seasons.

Each photo captures

brass players, drummers, pit people,

even woodwind players

she’s had on her arm.

In total,

they count for half the people in the ensemble.

In the front cover rests a picture she’s torn in half,

one side, unmarked, has her in her pristine uniform,

the other, with devil horns and a pitch fork inscribed in sharpie,

All worn by the drum major she despises,

the one who spread a rumor about her

and the boy in the color guard,

who’s orientation everyone questions.

“Hey Dad?” She bobbed on her heels, the curls in her pigtails bouncing. Her small pink hands grasped onto the corner of his armchair as she leaned towards him.

“Yes Princess? He glanced down through the narrow passage between the newspaper and his face.

“Would you pray for me?”

The newspaper sank a little, crackling slightly as it wrinkled in his hands. “What’s wrong?”

Princess beamed, her curls bouncing a second time. “Oh, nothing’s wrong Daddy.”

“Oh?”

“Mommy says that when two or more people pray, God’s with ‘em.”

“Mm-hm.” One of his eyebrows stretched to the ceiling knowingly. “And what are you praying for?”

“A pony.”

“A pony? But Princess….”

“Would you please pray for me? Pretty please?”

“Of course. But don’t get mad at me if God says to wait.”

My ancestors journeyed over an ocean,

to what they saw as a new world,

but I think they became new,

like new pronunciation,

new religion,

a new neighborhood,

a new language,

A new identity.

___________

My mother and her sisters

wouldn’t have known that their distant

cousins wore stars of David

on their sleeves,

a few years before my mother’s birth,

or that fifth-cousins-three times-removed

wanted a neighborhood of their own,

without imposing walls or armored tanks on the other side.

__________

She wouldn’t have known that her relatives wanted their own national identity.

_________

She wouldn’t have known,

if someone had not said:

“You’re Jacob’s,

Are you Jewish?”

K

K reigns as the king of letters,

though it shares its ending proclamations with C,

and it allows Q to start the queens,

and P to get its princes and princesses started.

Sometimes K demands to be

known, and knighted,

but seldom asks to be pronounced out loud