Bolivia Series, Breakfast in El Alto, Pastel, by John Cummings
Note: the poem is read by Keith Hansen
Question: What Scares You the Most?
For Dave Mehler
Answer: Well, for starters:
My bedroom patio door left open, a rattlesnake silent somehow coiled on my book shelf
striking me in the face.
Falling asleep next to my infant daughter and I roll onto her face.
Trying to be a good sport with several dads sitting in a duck blind next to a troubled
damaged boy and the barrel of his 20-gauge he can’t keep out of my face.
Under the bed at the beachfront bed and breakfast on the Oregon coast my toddler son finding colored looking candies– some fuckin persons spilt pills. And he’s eaten at least three.
Getting lost again naked in the desert.
Being dropped blindfolded and buck naked on 18th Ave. and Van Buren in deep Phoenix, Arizona.
Choking on Triscuits while looking eye to eye at my 4-year-old daughter.
Another corneal abrasion that doesn’t heal and requires a knife.
When my bad drug addict cousin got good and clean, and hissed with hate some of the stuff Jesus said at me.
In college as a red shirt freshman before practice being called out to the 50-yard line of Boise States blue turf. Getting in my stance and at the whistle hitting with all I had the 4th year starting pulling guard. Doing it again, and again, and again. As my neck jerks back the 8th time, I hear a sound like grinding teeth, but it’s behind my head several inches below my skull. And I can’t feel my legs anymore.
This one, several weeks ago:
My 12-year-old son abducted at the YMCA. Looking in the weight room, down the row of treadmills mills, under stalls in the changing rooms and now I’m standing with a water bottle, goggles, and towel in the parking lot back for a third time without him.
He rode home in the Jeep with his mother.
Going back some:
At my uncle’s farm falling from the hay loft into the stall with a Brahma cow and her calf.
That dream I had as a boy of that Brahma coming in the screen door, through the kitchen, down the hallway, up the carpeted steps to the room in the attic, goring me in bed.
That red bull I saw in the movie theatre, age six, driving all the remaining beautiful mare unicorns into the ocean.
Having to live again and again, those 20-minute lunch recesses as a freshman at a new high school with pimples and sweaty palms and fingering breath mints in my linty jean pockets seeing the girls, I loved so much, laugh and gyrate at the cutie pies boys whom I sat down with three straight fastballs repeatedly in little league.
That when I threw 93 mph as a freshman in high school my mother said, “You won’t get away with your diarrhea mouth. God is watching. It will cost you on the pitching mound.” And she was right.
My wife addled, shaming me just like my mother did.
My animal rage unleashed at the wrong person.
My children not wanting to return home, ever.
Waiting for the blood work results from hematology because clearly something is off.
Drinking too much booze doesn’t explain it away. And neither does booze change the fact I am still waiting five to seven business days.
My children talking to me as a tired nurse holds a screen to my face, my jaw slack, and they know I likely can’t hear them and am already gone. Every 14 seconds the ventilator jerks my head.
Worse yet, dying the way the horseman and welder Rex did, disoriented and lost in his pajamas like a prepubescent boy.
If I am really honest:
The t-post driver flipping and smashing my skull, and it is not the orange warm gushy feeling in my underwear rattling the tip of my spine, or bleeding profusely from the head, but a head trauma causing me to permanently lose whatever part of the brain that makes meaning.
Holding one of my children’s lifeless bodies.
If I had to leave my family every year for eight-months and build Budapest brick by brick for the Austro- Hungarian Empire.
That I am too pussy to have been Alexei Navalny’s friend.
At gun point being forced to read my poems to folks who don’t much like poetry.
No, rather there is no gun, just being naïve.
________________
Craig Goodworth
Review by Nancy Christopherson
This is a stunning grouping of confessions. So many of these scenarios surprise with their tenderness, their terror, their clear-eyed honesty, with the carefully depicted images, many from a father’s perspective. Snake bite in the face, yep, that’ll do it. Holding one of your dead children’s bodies? Oh gosh, oh gosh. Choking to death before your 4-year old’s very eyes. How could anyone bear that? These make me feel anxious and frightened too. There are so many possibilities here that bring us to our knees. But what makes the whole poem for me, the whole poem, is that one really powerful line near the end: That I am too pussy to have been Alexei Navalny’s friend. WOW! Very few people would ever be brave enough to admit that. Bravo, poet Craig Goodworth, my hats off to you for such an original, sincere, powerful and interesting composition of a poem which, while lengthy, never once loses my attention.