Gets up at midnight, drinks gallons of Coke

And loves TV. She plays the remote

Like an instrument until her radar tunes in

The best of the wee hours, obscure documentaries

Like St. Dymphna: Patroness of the Mentally Ill.

Around her TV chair are stacks of books,

Magazines, Coke bottles and plastic sacks.

 

She has a multitrack mind, reading Aristophanes

And assorted poetry during infomercials.

Her tower of plastic sacks is six feet tall

And lists to the East. Anathema also stands six feet

And drinks so much Coke she weighs 260.

She loves to smoke, exhaling in long, beautiful plumes

That drift over her head like question marks.

 

She bathes once a month in Mr. Clean,

Using SOS on the soles of her feet.

Her hair is two inches long and combed into peaks,

An echo of the shock she feels in being alive.

Anathema would like to be feral

And adores the privacy of her trailer park,

Cherishing the oxymoron of a mobile home.

 

Our friendship began after school in Jr. High,

Listening to her dad, Bill, play jazz in the living room,

His piano lifting the modest neighborhood

To the pluperfect tense, maybe even to the stars,

His improvisations following the curve of the melody

Like a bird working a hot air current for all its worth.

 

Life is hard on those it doesn’t get—

So when the world says no and sings off key

Anathema and I replay our common memory:

Her father, Bill, cooking the keys in the living room,

Making life more beautiful and easy to bear,

Landing just the right note every time.

The Goldfish Suicide

​

by Linda Purdy

Like a saffron robed monk

He kept his vow of solitude

Swimming circles of silent devotion

Around the narrow circumference

Of his golden life.

He lived in the kitchen—

His bright glass globe

On the window sill,

Alongside the ripening green tomatoes

And purple velvet violets.

In the early afternoon,

Beams of sunlight lit his bowl;

He would rise to the surface

To feed his soul

On rays of illumination.

Yet if you faced him close up—eye to eye,

The water magnified his presence,

As in a trick mirror at the carnival.

He looked enormous and distorted:

A twisted golden freak.

I was fifteen when

I won him at the county fair—

A lucky aim at the penny arcade.

I didn’t even name him—

Poor anonymous fish,

Living in the kitchen,

So far from nature and so close

To the sink,

Filled with dirty dishes

Five days old.

My mother, being frugal,

Saved odd leftovers.

That’s why the glass of chocolate milk

Landed on the window sill

Next to his bright cell.

Opaque and brown,

Most likely spoiled,

The chocolate milk

Became his neighbor

And his lure.

Even the best of us

Are restless and want more.

So who can say if it was ambition

Or some darker wish

That urged him

To forsake his vow.

With one mighty leap

He answered to temptation,

And flung himself into the dark

Unknown.

I was still fifteen,

When I found him

Floating in the chocolate,

But I got it—The world so big—

his fish bowl, so very small.