Listen to David Gewanter reading “Traffic of Creations.”
I. Frozen Margarita
Meeting monthly at Pizza Hut
the CryoGenic Support Group
talks the new technology, how
someday a sleepless
gearhead Dr. F
will cure their deaths,
regenerating the whole,
now diseaseless body or
(for the economically
minded) just
the blanched, nitrogenized
head, severed and preserved—
Tonight it’s the poor
who live best, their
dispensable torsos
fatted like Balzac:
head-only Harry
orders pepperoni,
double cheese,
and stout;
but for full-body
Bertha the flesh is a temple,
rigid debutante waiting for
its white-suited date:
“Veg Sampler, please,
and lite beer—”
Meeting at the next table,
Adult Children of Parents.
II. “Don’t go down on any bunny.”
Ski-masked
ax-wielding
anti vivisectionists
chop down lab doors, freeing
100 grey rabbits
caged for research
and infected with
herpes. “How do you
keep safe from
herpid rabbits?”
III. Thrift, Horatio, Thrift
His nuptial poems,
so loving they moistened
Every listener’s eye
and seat, did coldly
Furnish forth cash
for his alimony payments.
IV. A is for Allegory
Festooned in torn posters
for and against the Contras,
a new bookshop hires
slim dancers to perform:
two stalk in as
wind-up dolls,
each turning the other’s key
yet turning it
less each time,
sapping its own strength
with helping, hobbled,
gimpy, stiffening …
then a third one
whirls from the aisle
marked Health
and cranks them
so they waddle and teeter
throughout the store,
silly signs
of promised creations,
past Auto and Women,
past Family
and not Poetry
while the third falls
from Aging, hands
on head, simon says,
a little crouching a.
