AUNT CALLS WANDAWOOWOO AN AIRHEAD
I am an airhead--my head is full
of air the way a prairie is.
Clouds rise in me. Still,
Aunt Rita, a woman who thinks
Purgatory is a Spice Girl,
didn’t mean to be unkind.
She likes her family firmly in place
like the heavy mahogany credenza
with Uncle Lonnie’s picture
of him in a long-sleeve shirt
half draped by a fading lilac.
Family, an audition to get a part
that you’d rather not play—
yet you step on stage anyway.
WANDAWOOWOO CLAIMS
to visit Saturn often,
moons like frosted roses on a cake.
A garden, space
needs no weeding.
She goes alone.
Some beauty prefers privacy—
The Starry Night,
just you and the painting,
the rest of humanity
standing inside
giant rings
of boredom and grief.
HALF A MINUTE
Wandawoowoo watched You Tube in her home office,
knew she should have been working on the Jamerson account.
At tax time Jamerson polished carving knives of questions.
The phone rang. Her father had died suddenly
watching a rerun of Gomer Pyle USMC and
wham, gone.
Her sister Ava kept knocking on the door
and through the window she saw him stone still.
She called 911. Mr. Applebee was gone.
Gomer had offended his girlfriend Lou-Ann Poovie.
It ended without agony.
Deepening snow. The half a minute before the call.
That time when the world looks so lovely that she might
chase spring away. Then the phone.
Kenneth Pobo has a new book out from Circling Rivers called Loplop in a Red City. In addition to Broadkill Review, his work has appeared in: Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, Philadelphia Stories, and elsewhere.