| Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Thirty-eight Summer 2015 |
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| The World Is Not a Bowling Ball Courtney Elizabeth Justus I have smelled the hubris on your letters and I understand. Actually, I don’t, so I went to the zoo to watch penguins in the hope of shaking your words like I do my boyfriend on a twin bed at his mother’s house. Except that I don’t have a boyfriend whose mother I could compliment, eat her scrambled eggs and talk about Jimmy Fallon on the TV set, lip-synching like a stoned baboon with girls in crotch-tight miniskirts and peanut buttered smears of lipstick. Maybe if penguins understood Jimmy Fallon and why I am sad, they would stick their little heads, like polar bowling balls, out of the tank and make human words like in that movie Happy Feet. But they’re not going to. They refuse to teach me how to dance salsa and smoke a bong and handle a revolver like a meal of anchovies. But the world is not a bowling ball I can throw at these frustrations. I cannot hurl it at penguins or at my inexistent boyfriend’s mother. I just wish I could penguin-watch with you, because you taught me why the world is not a bowling ball, and maybe if we saw penguins plucking anchovies and bobbing like plastic water bottles in the tubing river, then we wouldn’t have to worry about whose bed we shake on, because we are not bowling balls, trying to throw ourselves at a world we don’t understand. |
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