At the Monkey Factory

We don’t kill any monkeys, not even the ones that don’t pass QC.
Instead, we discount them and ship them direct to you as factory seconds.

Some of those monkeys are perfectly good monkeys. Who cares if a monkey has
a birthmark, or maybe an extra kink in its tail? Not me. That’s why one day,

I just stopped killing defective monkeys. Just stopped. My boss thought I was crazy,
almost fired me, said we’d be overrun with monkey returns, and what would we do

then? But I know about monkeys. Once you have a monkey, you’re not going to
return it, even if it bites (and they often do). So I think it was a pretty good decision,

and also I’ve stopped having those nightmares. I can’t even tell you about them
except to say that every night, a monkey reached its hand up to mine,

from the floor, you understand—and I killed that monkey anyway.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 28 (prompt: Write about how it feels to stand up for what’s right when faced with adversity in the workplace). Speaking of adversity, WordPress hates this poem and won’t present it properly. It’s supposed to have five two-line stanzas followed by a single line on its own. I can’t make this happen, and my last attempt resulted in the whole thing disappearing. If you want to see it as I intended, let me know and I’ll send it to you. OK, moving on …

Villain

In line at the Bon Marché in Seattle with my mother,
I heard a high-pitched scream. A woman ahead of us
laughed and said it was probably her husband, who
was afraid of escalators. Life moved on, but my mind
stayed in that groove for a long time—maybe a couple
of years. Somehow, that screaming man became a

villain, Snidely Whiplash-style, with mustache,
top hat, and cape. We moved from Seattle to
Thief River Falls, Minnesota, but the memory
moved with me, packed away someplace
secret, so I could play it like a Disney 45

in my playroom in the basement, any time
I needed to scare myself, any time I needed
to make my formless, nameless fear into
something I could turn on and off, or just
let play, over and over, until it was done.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 27 (prompt: write about a hero or villain). Also for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets, which will open at 3 p.m. EST today (Tuesday).

Fruit Crate Labels, Seattle

It’s coming up on ten years since I was thirty, standing on
the side of a hill with my husband in downtown Seattle,
the city where I was born—or I was born near it, anyway,
which is what you say when you’re as suburban as I am,
or was. I am urban now, so I know how it is to stand and
smile politely, interject a word or two, as a stranger jabbers
at you—in this case, about virtual reality helmets. That was
just the thing to listen to in 2003, how everything was right
on the verge of changing. And it was; he was right about that,
the antique store employee who followed us to keep talking
after I had paid $75 for a stack of fruit crate labels, brightly
inked and printed, and then piled in a warehouse, unused
for decades, preserved—as was explained on a small square
of paper stuck to the back of each plastic sleeve. I thought
these would be my new things—collecting fruit crate labels,
visiting Seattle. But now, I could no more drop $75 on labels
than I could go back there to see if the city still slants as it
once did, whether the hill is still there, the store, the man,
if he ever made his fortune in the virtual world, or whether
he found, as we did, just how real actual reality can be.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 26 (prompt: write about something you collect or wish you could collect).

Shallows

I only swim where my belly grazes the bottom;
I only fly on the lowest air currents I can reach.
I never stretch for anything, never look at
anything unpleasant. I leave those

logic puzzles to the philosophers; who cares
about how the world works, and life, or all
those questions that you can’t turn off?
It all hurts my head; that’s why I stay

here, above it all (but just barely), bobbing
on ginger ale bubbles and celebrity gossip,
both of which I get piped in daily, so I
don’t even have to leave my house,

the place where I am always the prettiest,
the brightest and the best. I always wear
an attitude T-shirt, even when there’s
no one here to read it, so I go into

my mirrored closet, shut the door, talk
to myself about myself, for as long as
it takes to convince myself that I’m
OK, that it’s OK, it’s all OK now.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 25. The prompt was to write a poem that is the opposite of one we wrote earlier this month. A couple of days ago, I wrote this one called Depths.

The Truth About Ice Skating

Once you lose your nerve, it’s over.
You might stay on your feet, thanks to
the laces you tightened until your fingers
could take no more. But you won’t enjoy it,
not when you’re thinking so much about every
wobble, whether your legs will slide out from
under you, like Bambi’s, and when every chunk
in the ice could be the one that brings you down,
and the only question is whether you will fall
forward or back, and if forward, which part
of your face will hit first, and whether
anything—glasses, teeth, skin—will
be broken, and also whether
anyone will skate over
your hands,

splayed in front of you as if in
supplication or defeat. It is a
shame, not to be in love
anymore, when the
moon is out, cold
and close as
the ice.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 24 (prompt: the truth about ____).

Depths

Deep in the vein of jam,
there is the sun, locked in
memory, how it coaxed hard,
green fruit into soft and red, then
bristled it all over with seeds, and
the tiny hairs that protected this
investment until the berry
was picked, cooked,
jarred, eaten.

II.

Deep in the blood, there is the
sound, a sluicing rhythm you can’t
hear, except late at night when you are
alone, or may as well be, your partner
sleeping, unable to tell you that the noise
doesn’t mean you’re going to die, which
is, of course, the greatest falsehood
love ever tells.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 23 (prompt: a deep poem).

Paradise

Coconuts kiss you on their long way down
to sugar sands (here, at last, your clichés
are acceptable, even hailed as original)
as palm fronds gently caress your cheek
or playfully slap it—your choice, and you
also get to choose which type of cheek.
This is endless summer, a bottomless
sunset daiquiri that never leaves you
mouth-dry and filled with regret.
In the gift shop, many items are
personalized, and all bearing
your name, no matter how
unusual your name was
in life.

At last, Harbert and Micheline,
Wilford and Atalanta, you are #1,
and you have the license plate
to show it. By the way, you have
a bike to put it on, and it has
a banana seat and a flag,
and you will never look
ridiculous riding it.

Your spouse is here, and does not
tell off-color jokes or make any
embarrassing noises. Not all
of your friends are here,
though some might
arrive in another
twenty years
or so.

But you won’t miss them, because
there are new friends here, like
Bob and Sandy with their
perfect hair and polite
way of inquiring
about your
final

moments, how it felt to come here,
and whether you think there
might be a crack or a door
somewhere, a way to
escape, go back

home.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 22 (prompt: paradise).

Orbit

What goes around … comes
so many times, you begin
to get sick of it, frankly.

Everything repeats
sooner or later; life runs
on invisible wheels

that are easy to feel
spinning under you
if you’re not too

brokenhearted
to feel anything but
your brokenness.

So what? It’s easy to forget
the cycles that run us,
when it seems as if

everything moves forward,
not in circles, after all. I like it,
the illusion that we’re each

walking somewhere, or
that any of us is able
to hold still, ever.

“I will wait,” we say. But
there is no waiting, only transit,
on our loop around the sun.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 21 (prompt: write a poem incorporating five random song titles).

Recycling

Let it go, the story still in
the drop of beer in the bottom
of each bottle. Whisper it out

with water; then imagine how
each empty will tell a story
about you: Did you have

a wild party, or did you drink
all twelve by yourself (and,
if so, in what span of time)?

Imperial red. Milk stout.
The names are stories, too.
The labels. The bottle caps.

Your son likes to gather those,
click them together like gears.
What a thing to let him play with,

but there’s no denying that
each one is each one, attractive
to magpies and little boys.

Let him keep them for a while
or a longer while, bordering on
forever, so that a few years

from now, you’ll be surprised
he still has them. How did that
happen? How is it that years pass

and some small things stay with us?
Toss the bottles in the bin in the alley
to be crushed, refilled, made new.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 20 (prompt: gathering and/or letting go). Will also be for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets, once that’s up (links can be posted there each Tuesday, starting at 3:00 p.m. Eastern).

Nurple

“After the dandelions had spread like
marmalade over the lawns, after
the lilacs had come white and purple

and gone, then it was blueberrying”

—Thomas R. Moore, “Sex, Cousins, and Blueberrying”

In summer that year, we were nine
and ten, composed almost entirely
of mosquito bites and moxie, with
a quiver of sadness somewhere in
the middle, where we were still as
soft as children are. So we’d strike
each other’s biceps to show that
we weren’t soft at all, didn’t care
about broken things, a stolen bike,
after the dandelions had spread like

butter or the blood of all those bugs,
ladybugs, that we squashed, almost
always on accident. We just wanted
to look at them, hold them on blades
of grass that began to dry, shrivel in
the sun, our sweaty hands. Laughter
was almost not allowed; as we ate
fancy sandwiches our mothers made,
we were as silent as roof and rafter.
Marmalade over the lawns, after

we were done, stuck to the grass as
proof that we’d been there. We liked
to leave our mark. When we weren’t
quiet, we made noise, running down
the morning streets, discovering how
something as small as a loud burp will
disturb the great drift of silence behind
every closed window. We would lift our
shirts sometimes, check for a nurple.
The lilacs had come, white and purple;

we loved the word purple, and spent
all summer rhyming it as close as we
could, arriving at nurple also because
we couldn’t say the real word. It was
too much like health class, ridiculous
and scary, when we were tarrying
a while longer as girls, girls never
knowing how few the years were
before we’d both end up marrying
and gone. Then it was blueberrying.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 18. The prompt was to write a glosa, which is a completely crazy form. Crazy! You take four consecutive lines from someone else’s poem, then write four 10-line stanzas of your own. The final line of each stanza is from the other poem, in consecutive order — and lines six, nine, and 10 in each stanza have to rhyme. (I did not fully comprehend all of this before I chose a poem that contains the word purple.)

For the epigram (quoted poem), one reason I chose this one is that it is my “neighbor” on a preceding page in the Summer 2012 issue of Naugatuck River Review. Thomas R. Moore is from Brooksville, Maine, and sharp-eyed readers might find one place where I gave a nod to his home state. (Well, blueberries are Maine-ish, too, but it’s not that.)

Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia

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