Tuesday poem #572 : Kyle McKillop : Invalid Response

 

 

This headache is a life-sized dinosaur play park
fronted by dueling stegosaurus and T-Rex.
Small children race across the headache

to pet spikes, to pose beneath scaly haze.
Voices jumble—a father in jorts
shouts for everyone to squeeze closer

to the headache for posterity,
while a woman wipes a wild face
clean of mustard and screams

for another to climb down off
a smaller, sorer kid. Greasy hands
spill yellow popcorn from a miniature train

trudging its brontosaurus engine
across the headache, and velcroed shoes
leap from safety grating to ground,

a brief freedom from the tyranny of lineups.
In the lot, a poodle barks in a car under a tree,
the sun shadowing fingers of headache

across the asphalt. Family groups break away
now and then to explore the rest
of the headache: the triceratops nest,

the raptor enclosure, the pterodactyls—
how their wings spread, silhouettes
rammed into sky by the steel shafts

sunk into the headache. In the men’s room,
someone has left a topic of discussion
for the teenager who mops the headache,

and at the snack bar, cotton candy
headaches holey teeth. So where am I?
Follow the sign for the pachycephalosaurus,

yonder in a meadow encircled by magnolias.
I crouch there, teeth bared, forehead tilted,
forever glaring at something beyond

my frame of reference. The weight of this skull.
This headache. The blue sky and its white puffs.
They change shade, the first hint of sunset, of sleep.

 

 

 

 

Kyle McKillop is a poet and teacher with an MFA in creative writing from UBC. His work has appeared in CV2, English Practice, Quarandreams, Sustenance, and his chapbook What I Will Do For Attention, among others. He lives on the unceded shared traditional territory of the Katzie and Kwantlen First Nations.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan