Who Will Give My Father a Needle, a Mouse, a Cat and a Bird?
from a verbal test to determine differences in regional pronunciation
I will. I will give him this needle,
slipped from its red plastic disk,
its tiny eye waiting. He will give me
dark thread which I’ll unspool
like the thinnest shadow. I will
give my father a mouse, cut neatly
from the bright illustrated pages
he sleepwalks through. I will give
my father the mouse whose nest
is wrecked, the mouse holding
its own tail in perfect anxiety,
the mouse with its four blind newborns
—tiny naked thumbs—in my house.
Who will give these mice a father?
I will give my father a cat
for the mice to toy with.
I will give him this bird trapped in a doorway,
a mad heart in feathers and pulsing eyes.
He will give me these hands, perfect empty nests.
In The ER Waiting Room With My Girlfriend
Each fevered chair is filled with a girl
her mouth open, yellow breaths passing
through pale lips. She’s hoping for a new doctor,
some dilaudid or vicodin. She looks at
the TV. I watch the girls change
into women with wild hair and hard feet
in worn-out slippers, into a college boy
with a busted ankle and some girl he might fall
in love with, into a woman in a wheelchair burying
her blazing head against the man who strokes her
as if she doesn’t burn his hands.
Rita Mae Reese (she/her) is the author of The Book of Hulga. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She designs Lesbian Poet Trading Cards for Headmistress Press, is in the bluegrass band Coulee Creek, and serves as the Co-Director at Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.
Photo by The Dark Queen