Issue 17 • Spring 2006 • Featured Writer • Poetry

Pink Eye

Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor

Tornadoes Want Us to Chase Them
-- Suzanne Buffam

Up up up goes the furniture from Joey's attic room -- bed, dresser, bye oh bye -- I loved you, bedspread from Appalachia, parfum from Woolworth's, the kind with a crystal stopper!

We are crosscurrent casualties. And where were you, my pretty? Under the leaves, fast asleep?

Nope, under the ice shelf with the manatees and small fishes. O' dear, it was a swirl, a backflip, and the water was colored with urchins and grease. Imagine Lucky Charms and seafarers. I was mortified and calcified and other fieds except terrified my shoes got soaked and laces got ripped and toe jammed.

Basta.

Then, suddenly and without light, we were Ozing and all surreal, Neil! The room began to spin, our lips to grin, and all that we were taught by fools began to din!

Basta Spumonti.

M, and M2, when gravity paid especial attention to velocity did you a. count sheep b. wish for sheep c. wear fleece or d. shimmy?

Shimmied like a Polaroid picture.

But that was before existential ice set.

Now I ponder oldness and ski-doo-ness, a special killing ski-doo for entry level funnel clouds. Down at the Quadomain, the women lost their work-out room. I tell you: Glass glass glass glass glass glass.

I love Sharon Glass in Queer as Folk, don't you? Although sometimes I think she overdoes it a little -- just a little, kind of like Hurricane Alpha: what the hell is that?

Have you heard of Beta? It's plunkering toward Central A. Oh, and Ms. Parks passed and she will be the first (black) woman to lie in state under the big ol' dome? It's amazing how, well, you know, the way stinky white men put their pot bellies into suits and claim soup. Yes, soup.

To explain further: Pink eye is a disorder of the retina and what happens is the white turns pink, both the color of bunnies, and the next thing you know, a doctor is rolling your eyelid up a toothpick perpetuating the stereotypical roll of pain causer. Not so. More like: Pink eye is a quiet time in the middle of hurricane Pinkie, a sassy little #3 who came over the foot of Florida and popped us all. I fell asleep during Pink's eye and when I woke up it was suddenly and my front window was shaking Hey Ya.

Hey.

Maureen Seaton's latest collection is Venus Examines Her Breast (Carnegie Mellon University Press), winner of the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award. She is also the author of Little Ice Age; Furious Cooking, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Fear of Subways, winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize; and The Sea Among the Cupboards, winner of the Capricorn Award and the Society of Midland Authors Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, New Republic, Bloom, and many other journals both on- and off-line. The recipient of an NEA fellowship and two Pushcart prizes, she is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Neil de la Flor's work has appeared or is expected in Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, Admit2, Scene360, 42opus, and Lodestar Quarterly. He is the managing editor of Mangrove and lives in Miami, Florida.

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