Little Reflections

Keep changing the subject until the subject changes you.

Or at least have it wash up, right Dean?  Put it to bed.

You’ll see it in the morning. Keep up with wet diapers.

Your wraparound sunglasses don’t obscure your look

of bewilderment, Mr. Undergraduate.  It’s Thursday

morning and already I’m tapping my knee with this

impatient pencil like a water bottle drips torture on

the crotch of my pants but I’ve got to keep an eye

on the kids, sorry. They are little reflections in a cup

of soda left on the bleachers after a 3-2 loss.  Green with

misunderstood and uncontrolled urges to choke, in the

morning you look like the Creature From the Black

Lagoon, part scuba mask, part flying fish. My cat will

die an old bachelor. It’s always at the very end when

children recognize their meanness, their small cruelties.

A robin is two feet from me and doesn’t know I’m alive.

It will become food for worms. Ironic. The particular

appetites of internet-fed middle-class children: apple

grass and saw tooth lemons. Scribbles and sugar packets.

Warm bamboo and smoked Gouda. Butts and Ash leaves.

Lettuce and sausages. Cat and mouse, cheese and

curds of mud. Carbon and dark matter. It’s all pain

in the ass like I don’t have other things going on

Thursday afternoon. I bought two brooms. I put one

in the closet and hid the other in an epic glen. Believe

you me, a forfeiture of straw can bungle your bangles

but by Thursday night I had settled all those loose ends,

tied up all moving pieces, put down the stampede.

By Saturday we were miles off in some uncharted

valley of grasses and love letters. It was all all-too-

poignant: we hated middle management (naturally),

our lives run rough shod by a vice president we should

have sucker punched on our way off the roof.

Jeff McRae is an employment specialist working with disabled youth and young adults. He earned an MFA in Poetry from Washington University, St. Louis and an MA in Writing from the University of New Hampshire. New poems appear or are forthcoming in Hiram Poetry Review, Rattle, A-Minor Magazine, One Art, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. He also plays drums and washboard in bluegrass, trad. jazz, and NOLA swamp rock bands.