Tuesday poem #361 : Jennifer Soong : Excerpt from “Happenstances”

I told you one thing           

                                   

                        felt another

made me feel         

            a weird thing

           

ditsy in the wind

           

                           hustling of leaves   

            smoke like a cat

mounting from air to air -----------------------

I lose my neutrality

                        a splash of the dishes

We happen to be out                    why blame us &

                           What with my sixties I wonder

            will I do?

-----------------Poems like these

                                    about nothing                       

                                               

are not          very good

                        for fixing problems

or alleviating minds.                      Once, unknowingly

            I peed into a toilet

                        where (surprise!)

was a dead mouse

                                    & thought

this is mother nature.

                                    Two months later

I get away

                        with the burner cooking,

staying           for hours    with nothing on.

Jennifer Soong is the author of Near, At (Futurepoem 2019). Her poems have appeared in Social Text, Fanzine, Berfrois, Panda's Friend, Omniverse, DIAGRAM, and others, and has been translated into Spanish. She is the poetry editor at Nat. Brut. and currently lives in New Jersey, where she works on poetry and forgetting at Princeton University.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan