Rita Mae Reese
The Zookeeper’s
Daughter Drives to the Store
Almost everywhere today the sun and its rays are merciless,
beating down on houses, shouting up from the pavement,
consummating all of our dark ideas. The heat immobilizes a woman
driving to the grocery, leaving her staring senselessly at a green
light,
enraging other drivers who just want
to go where they are going – now.
Fingers grip everything too tightly or
too loosely today, the way the heart
grips every day, tightly panicked like the bears still inside the zoo,
glaring
hopelessly at the sinkhole that has opened but offers no exit. She turns
at the
intersection of Herself and Something Else, down a known but unfamiliar
street, past a
Jaguar with a flat tire and a fifty-something man in a blue, wrinkled
suit on his
knees beside it; his pale hands are awkward with the tire iron, weaker
than the chrome
lug nuts—five stubborn stars. Two boys on bicycles quietly watch the
sweating
man. Is it possible everything is melting together? Her thighs and the
Blue Ridge
Naugahyde seat are becoming one. The day is a Salvador Dalí soup
or a finger painting by a disturbed child. She runs a red light,
parks at the grocery store next to a guy in a Land Rover daydreaming
about
quantum field theory. He smiles as if she’s part of an exhibit he
approves of.
Right outside the door are some Girl Scouts selling cookies and
she walks past them not buying, turns down the first aisle
to buy tamari sauce and tofu and vegetables, though who wants to eat in
this heat –
ubiquitous and unwholesome, rubbing thoughts together in her head, all
vying for dominance, trying to get the tongue and mouth to free them
into the air.
Who wants to shop for the food sitting sullen on the shelves,
shrink-wrapped
Xeroxed examples of genetic engineering. She buys irradiated
yellow squash. She would have bought organic but she wasted her money at
the
zoo, whispering words of encouragement to the bears when she was alone
with them.
The Alchemist’s
Daughter Learns to Masturbate
After school, I
assembled the plastic parts of the Wolfman,
gave him a stand
to anchor him outside of my dreams
painted his jacket
and his lips red,
his teeth a
thrilling white—clenched against my name.
Next, I assembled
myself from parts of the dead
each part with its
own will, barely under my control.
I grunted ones and
zeros through the village and feared fire.
In the poetry
section of the public library,
I found a
cross—ornate and cheap—resting
by the window with
a few emaciated volumes.
I slept with it
clutched in my right hand, my arms crossed
against my chest,
exposing my long white neck
to the shadows of
night in my bedroom
while the cape
descended again and again,
giving my throat
the warmth of purpose with his long sharp teeth.
Rita Mae Reese has been named a
Martha Meier Renk Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She
won the Dean’s Prize in creative writing at Florida State University and
two of her poems won 2001/2002 Associated Writing Program Intro Journals
Project awards. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship
for Poetry. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and has appeared or
is forthcoming in Wild Sweet Notes II: More West Virginia Poetry,
Poetry from Sojourner, The Florida Review, River Styx,
Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, and Apalachee Review. | 