Peep Show
Part the curtains like the legs of a new lover,
—someone you could possibly care for.
Stare through the skin
as if the body held hostage by impulse,
and the organs only live to tell about it.
Caution:
Images on the screen are closer than they appear.
They hit home hard: like sooty sledgehammers.
Relax. Alone.
Enjoy the show.
What’s in a Name
Before my freshman started reading Romeo and Juliet,
I asked them to write down everything they knew about the play,
then share with the class.
Activating prior knowledge provides the teacher a sense
of what needs to be taught.
“So what can you guys tell me about this classic piece of literature?”
“Isn’t Juliet like, the one that was really high up on the balcony
and like, let her really really long hair down?” Diana asked.
“That’s from a fairy tale you moron. Rumplestiltskin,” Oliver informed her.
“Oh. Well who’s the guy that was gonna’ like, take the baby if the queen
couldn’t guess his name?”
“Oh yeah. He gave her three guesses. That’s Rip Van Winkle.”
I shook my head sickly, surrounded by their ignorance wanting to put
myself to sleep. Better yet, climb Rapunzel’s boundless tresses to burst
their aimlessly floating bubbles, so clearly riddled with gunk like their
fresh pimples pleading to be popped; the intense pressure of forefingers
compressing until insurgent pus shoots out exploding all over the mirror
blurring their own definitions of all they thought to be right in life.
“You guys are killing me. I feel like pulling out my hair.
But then in addition to a bad haircut, my weakness would be exposed
and I’d be powerless!” I confessed, a temporary moment of vulnerability.
To which Diana meekly raised her hand and added,
“Like Sampson. Right?”
Daniel Romo is an MFA candidate in poetry at Antioch University, and will be featured this spring in an anthology of up and coming Southern California poets published by Moon Tide Press titled Pop Art: An Anthology of Orange County Poetry. More of his writing can be found at Peyote Soliloquies.
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