The Turtle
At dinner we make our guests pray to the turtle,
our household’s sacred spirit and valued pet.
Holding nerveless hands, we focus our eyes
on the shell holding up our children’s globe,
which spins each continent around, stopping
on North America, our one and only love.
Sometimes visitors object, saying their god
can outrun our tortoise any day of the week.
Immediately we set up a race between the two,
and when his or her deity refuses to show up,
we don’t bother waiting another three hours
for our lord’s scaly head to break the ribbon.
Instead, we eat, and the planet’s held in balance,
our master asleep inside its mottled home,
tired from racing, not feeling like upsetting
invitees searching their Bibles for answers
to their savior’s disappearance from the world.
Our mashed potatoes may drop on the table,
gravy may spill on angry fiancées or friends,
but oceans remain painted blue, yellow earth
stays bumpy with scattered mountain ranges,
and the unknowing being below everything
remains quiet. We don’t know if it hears us.
It never faces us, it gives no explanations.
Invisible Things
You couldn’t have chosen a worse career:
juggling germs in your bony fingers,
giving audience members microscopes
so they can see what you’re doing &
make donations at the end of the performance.
The organisms are used to mucus and hands,
joyfully contaminating whatever they touch,
but you can’t leave well enough alone.
They have to be part of your one-man show
for amputees whose stumps won’t heal,
people recovering at home from pink slips,
singles who’ve lost partners to whirlpools
in falls and rivers on their honeymoons.
No one ever asked you to entertain others,
that’s what TV and the movies are for,
preventing each one of us from thinking,
which has never made anyone happy
in the entire history of recorded time.
There you are, flipping twirling bacteria
in the air toward your other arm,
throwing a cold virus over your shoulders
past a flu bug traveling in vectors toward
the spinning illnesses on the opposite side.
None of the terminally ill patients smile.
Whether its brain tumors or just life
that’ll destroy them in the end, all of them
are pushing want ads in your face,
circling the antibody secretarial work
that might free you from making us sick
with the invisible things we’re forced
to live with, what we can’t be freed from.
At dinner we make our guests pray to the turtle,
our household’s sacred spirit and valued pet.
Holding nerveless hands, we focus our eyes
on the shell holding up our children’s globe,
which spins each continent around, stopping
on North America, our one and only love.
Sometimes visitors object, saying their god
can outrun our tortoise any day of the week.
Immediately we set up a race between the two,
and when his or her deity refuses to show up,
we don’t bother waiting another three hours
for our lord’s scaly head to break the ribbon.
Instead, we eat, and the planet’s held in balance,
our master asleep inside its mottled home,
tired from racing, not feeling like upsetting
invitees searching their Bibles for answers
to their savior’s disappearance from the world.
Our mashed potatoes may drop on the table,
gravy may spill on angry fiancées or friends,
but oceans remain painted blue, yellow earth
stays bumpy with scattered mountain ranges,
and the unknowing being below everything
remains quiet. We don’t know if it hears us.
It never faces us, it gives no explanations.
Invisible Things
You couldn’t have chosen a worse career:
juggling germs in your bony fingers,
giving audience members microscopes
so they can see what you’re doing &
make donations at the end of the performance.
The organisms are used to mucus and hands,
joyfully contaminating whatever they touch,
but you can’t leave well enough alone.
They have to be part of your one-man show
for amputees whose stumps won’t heal,
people recovering at home from pink slips,
singles who’ve lost partners to whirlpools
in falls and rivers on their honeymoons.
No one ever asked you to entertain others,
that’s what TV and the movies are for,
preventing each one of us from thinking,
which has never made anyone happy
in the entire history of recorded time.
There you are, flipping twirling bacteria
in the air toward your other arm,
throwing a cold virus over your shoulders
past a flu bug traveling in vectors toward
the spinning illnesses on the opposite side.
None of the terminally ill patients smile.
Whether its brain tumors or just life
that’ll destroy them in the end, all of them
are pushing want ads in your face,
circling the antibody secretarial work
that might free you from making us sick
with the invisible things we’re forced
to live with, what we can’t be freed from.
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Dungeon
The puppets knew I could never leave the room.
TV’s spies watched me from inside the screen.
They had Hula-Hoop eyes that wiggled over
my body, spinning like electric snakes.
Outside the window the tree’s black branches
sang death jingles I stored inside my dreams.
Below me the carpet’s patterns answered
my fears with dizzy fabric, whip-lashed floor.
They said there was one door out of this place.
I looked in the sofa but all I found was change,
rusted coins that melted in my shaking hands.
Then the coffee table, but its magazines
fanned out from my touch, their pages flew away.
The fingers removed themselves from plush dolls,
walked on dropped toys to my detaching head.
They opened up the gate inside me. My mouth
spoke all the words everyone had wanted me
to say that my tongue couldn’t form on its own.
I talked about the sales at the mall today,
decorations for the torture room, chains
for the office, clothes to hang myself in,
a captive dressed sharp for the dungeon.
The Sports Page
Underneath the box scores I hide my face.
My children know me only as Red Sox 7,
Yankees 2, and my wife called me the Packer
when I scored a touchdown with her last night.
The Sports Page understands who I am:
a headline trumpeting the last business deal
I won in negotiation playoffs; cheating
in stocks the league will fine me for; an affair
with an office cheerleader booting me
to free agency, signing bonus melting
like my marriage. One day the Hall of Fame
will hang my jersey behind glass, my life’s
statistics included in record books
obsessive family members will diagram,
wondering if they can better my salary,
add wealth to the team. Right now, though, my son
wants to play catch, but he’s not professional,
his resume is sorely lacking. My daughter
uses non-performance drugs, picks up
minor leaguers I’d never let play for me.
When I slide into bed my beloved lay
in base, waiting to tag me out for lying.
I’m unable to run home to the truth,
even when the coach waves me on, “you’re safe.”
Torpedoes
We stored the torpedoes in the basement,
between the recumbent exercise bike
and the column of crappy board games,
leaning over like a Monopoly-version
of the Tower of Pisa. We needed to build
a submarine, but only had a Big Wheel
and rotting boards, no fissionable material
to throw in the reactor, no pipes or glass
for the periscope. Watching TV only helped
so much. The heroes quickly assembled
their machines in a montage right before
the commercials. They always won, but what
about us? Our list of targets grew each
school day: Mr. Fatrack the geometry teacher
who surprise quizzed us like it was his
birthday and swam like a walrus in our
neighborhood pool; Mrs. Nannigurl the
Home-Ec instructor who caught us baking
unknown substances in the oatmeal cookies,
Jeff the sleazebag who pelted us with condoms
and promised us we’d never get laid –
each person had his or her face etched on
the side of a bomb, a red X bleeding through
their eyes, ruining school picture smiles.
We glared through a window at our neighbor,
walking his dog, waving a fin in the watery air
at us, a clown fish greeting the sharks.
The day before we’d sent for a kit advertised
in a comic book. In six simple steps we’d
sink the hopes of thousands. Mom would ask
what we were doing downstairs, banging
and sawing, sizzling with our blow torches.
Nothing, we’d say. Can you make some
sandwiches and your world famous lemonade?
Donald Illich has published poems in The Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and New Zoo Poetry Review. He has poems forthcoming in several journals, including Passages North, Nimrod, LIT, The Sulphur River Literary Review, Plainsongs, CrossConnectMagazine, Xavier Review, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.
The puppets knew I could never leave the room.
TV’s spies watched me from inside the screen.
They had Hula-Hoop eyes that wiggled over
my body, spinning like electric snakes.
Outside the window the tree’s black branches
sang death jingles I stored inside my dreams.
Below me the carpet’s patterns answered
my fears with dizzy fabric, whip-lashed floor.
They said there was one door out of this place.
I looked in the sofa but all I found was change,
rusted coins that melted in my shaking hands.
Then the coffee table, but its magazines
fanned out from my touch, their pages flew away.
The fingers removed themselves from plush dolls,
walked on dropped toys to my detaching head.
They opened up the gate inside me. My mouth
spoke all the words everyone had wanted me
to say that my tongue couldn’t form on its own.
I talked about the sales at the mall today,
decorations for the torture room, chains
for the office, clothes to hang myself in,
a captive dressed sharp for the dungeon.
The Sports Page
Underneath the box scores I hide my face.
My children know me only as Red Sox 7,
Yankees 2, and my wife called me the Packer
when I scored a touchdown with her last night.
The Sports Page understands who I am:
a headline trumpeting the last business deal
I won in negotiation playoffs; cheating
in stocks the league will fine me for; an affair
with an office cheerleader booting me
to free agency, signing bonus melting
like my marriage. One day the Hall of Fame
will hang my jersey behind glass, my life’s
statistics included in record books
obsessive family members will diagram,
wondering if they can better my salary,
add wealth to the team. Right now, though, my son
wants to play catch, but he’s not professional,
his resume is sorely lacking. My daughter
uses non-performance drugs, picks up
minor leaguers I’d never let play for me.
When I slide into bed my beloved lay
in base, waiting to tag me out for lying.
I’m unable to run home to the truth,
even when the coach waves me on, “you’re safe.”
Torpedoes
We stored the torpedoes in the basement,
between the recumbent exercise bike
and the column of crappy board games,
leaning over like a Monopoly-version
of the Tower of Pisa. We needed to build
a submarine, but only had a Big Wheel
and rotting boards, no fissionable material
to throw in the reactor, no pipes or glass
for the periscope. Watching TV only helped
so much. The heroes quickly assembled
their machines in a montage right before
the commercials. They always won, but what
about us? Our list of targets grew each
school day: Mr. Fatrack the geometry teacher
who surprise quizzed us like it was his
birthday and swam like a walrus in our
neighborhood pool; Mrs. Nannigurl the
Home-Ec instructor who caught us baking
unknown substances in the oatmeal cookies,
Jeff the sleazebag who pelted us with condoms
and promised us we’d never get laid –
each person had his or her face etched on
the side of a bomb, a red X bleeding through
their eyes, ruining school picture smiles.
We glared through a window at our neighbor,
walking his dog, waving a fin in the watery air
at us, a clown fish greeting the sharks.
The day before we’d sent for a kit advertised
in a comic book. In six simple steps we’d
sink the hopes of thousands. Mom would ask
what we were doing downstairs, banging
and sawing, sizzling with our blow torches.
Nothing, we’d say. Can you make some
sandwiches and your world famous lemonade?
Donald Illich has published poems in The Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and New Zoo Poetry Review. He has poems forthcoming in several journals, including Passages North, Nimrod, LIT, The Sulphur River Literary Review, Plainsongs, CrossConnectMagazine, Xavier Review, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.
