Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley (e book free reading txt) 📗

a Driver’s Ed quiz

on intersections

because I could not model

how traffic proceeds at a four-way stop.

In my head, each car

arrived at the same time.

What happens when you yield

to the car on your right,

who yields to the car on his right,

who yields to the car on her right,

who yields to you?

No one goes anywhere.

The reality,

my teacher once explained,

is someone always claims

the right of way.

Four allies in four cars

meet at a four-way stop,

you know the one,

it’s over by Bob’s bodega.

The woman’s car on my right yields,

the woman’s car on her right yields,

the third car rolls a window down,

then I hear, Do you mind?

We’re in a hurry

for her OIT appointment.

What I call my disability

you call her disease:

treatable, curable, Thank God.

So that must be your daughter,

in the passenger seat?

She looks just like you.

CUSTOMER SERVICE IS

We take pride in serving the

We’re accustomed to servicing the

Please take the attached

Please answer these six

Please answer these eight

This will only be a quick

If microphones don’t reach, then

If ramps are required, then

If you need audio, then

If you need visual, then

We request one week’s

We request one month’s

All reasonable requests will

A flock of surveys is a surveillance.

A stampede of stairs is an architecture.

An expectation of elevators is a favor.

An “oh-crap” of crips is a caucus.

But I have an aunt who is

I had a friend who was

We practice best

We follow the

You have to see our

You have to stand up for

Your help is so

Your answers will be

SAY THE WORD

To be apart, I’m told.

To be asunder.

To be a privative, negative, reversing force.

To be reached only by oaths and curses.

To have black sheep sacrificed in my name

because I’m a god, yes,

as we are all gods on occasion.

To be bodied as I am bodied.

To be rich of earth,

which is to be chronically chthonic.

To be where the gems are—

underground.

To be Dīs. To be Dīs. To be Dīs.

To reject any pickaxe disguised as love.

POP

We call an unpuffed piece

the old maid

but she’s just the one

who read the fine print.

Germ and sugar curled

in her hard hull,

deciding whether

to shake out her sheets.

Sometimes it’s worth it—

pan, oil, flame.

Sometimes you must

hold the steam within you.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH GEORGE CATLIN

“Generokee”: a term describing one who claims

a distant and unsubstantiated relationship

to an American Indian tribe.

If I’d only ever seen one Catlin,

this would be a different conversation:

the rich red and blue oil paint

of Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat,

Head Chief, Blood Tribe, which

the Smithsonian catalogs as

Ethnic – Indian – Blackfoot

Dress – ethnic – Indian dress

Recreation – leisure – smoking

Object – other – smoking material

Or the frank gaze and stacked beads

of Koon-za-ya-me, Female War Eagle

(Ethnic – Indian – Iowa).

If there was just one on the wall

I might find it my favorite, amidst

a nineteenth-century blur of bucolic takes on

waterfalls and Manifest Destiny

(Landscape – phenomenon – rainbow).

Instead, I rock back and forth

on the museum’s mezzanine,

trying to take in Catlin’s

Indian Gallery—a grid of faces,

all that specificity of name and tribe

hidden beneath a number,

which I may look up within a replica

of Catlin’s own catalog,

as if checking the price on a couch

I’ve admired off the showroom floor.

What I could have noticed, viewing

the display of “his Indians,”

is how alone each subject is kept,

their only counsel his admiring gaze,

or how portraits share warm, puffy light,

a hint of foliage, making it easy to hide

whether painted on expedition

to the Plains or to London,

where he paid his subjects to dance

for the gallery’s crowds.

And yet. And yet

what would we have, if we

did not have this? Here

is that “we,” cozy

as an infected blanket.

So much taken under the decree

of numbered days,

the promised dwindling of “noble

savages.” This occurs to me

not at all in 2002, when

(Ethnic – White – Suburbia)

I buy postcards in the gift shop

from a show I don’t enjoy,

but have been told I’m supposed

to enjoy. A push-pin’s

worth of heritage, and the claim:

One-thirty-secondth, I think.

Cherokee. Maybe Navajo.

BASS PRO SHOPS

Bass Pro Shops began as a counter for worms and bait in the back of a Brown Derby liquor store in Branson, Missouri. Bass Pro Shops now makes over four billion dollars a year. The one in Memphis contains two restaurants, a hundred-room hotel, and America’s tallest freestanding elevator. The one in Harlingen, Texas, has a twelve-lane bowling alley called Uncle Buck’s Fishbowl and Grill.

Uncle Buck’s BBQ sauce is available in the condiments plaza. There are plazas for grills, tents, sleeping bags, footwear, and thermal-lined jackets. Bass Pro Shops offers reels, rods, and terminal tackle for all of your needs. Bass Pro Shops carries Tracker, SeaCraft, and Kenner for all of your needs. Bass Pro Shops has partnered with Remington, Winchester, and Benelli for all of your needs. The shotguns are upright and gleaming. Perhaps this stuffed menagerie of deer and bear should haunt me, but I’m only tired and a little hungry. Once, at a party in Connecticut, I opened a closet and found two mounted zebra heads tucked to the side behind some coats.

In Bass Pro Shops, fifty cents will get me twenty rounds at the shooting arcade. A shooting arcade is another name for a catch-and-release rifle. I would like to understand the thing that broke in me when someone aimed not a gun at my father, but a whole plane. I can hear the broken thing rattle as I walk.

The secret to enjoying camouflage-colored jellybeans is to ignore how they look in your palm. Uncle Buck’s hostess wants to talk Happy Hour specials. The Harlingen Outdoor World has a tank fashioned like a cross-section of a lake. Perch, catfish, and bass the color of dishwater circle and gawp. Bass Pro Shops puts in five entrances and a loading dock and calls it the outdoors. Bass Pro Shops puts a roof on something and calls it a world.

NON-COMMISSIONED: A QUARTET

A Golden Shovel

after Gwendolyn Brooks,

“Gay Chaps at the Bar.”

I.

No one chose us. We

chose ourselves. What a