Joanna Penn Cooper
Come On
Mostly a person who walked around with a smile plastered on her face would be
assumed to have something wrong with her. Except maybe Carol Channing. Even so.
In my town, certain people have obtained orange vests for the purpose of staying
safe at intersections when they are begging. This is cheaper than feeding, clothing,
or housing them. It has the added benefit of making them feel conspicuous. Some
of us are men and some of us are women. Sometimes we are metal or diamonds.
We are all people. Hungry and wanting. The more "cheeky" among us sometimes
forget this.
I no longer have favorites. Desire and delight and fatigue fade in and out like a scrim
at a play your mother took you to. What is being hidden and what revealed is
something I could ask myself. Two things I could ask.
My toddler wakes up and walks to the living room to sit in a box, saying, "All aboard."
Calling after his father in the morning, he says, "Be safe. Don't be upset." He stops
in the middle of breastfeeding to stick out his hand and say, "Nice to see you."
Character Sonnet
The evening my mother took me to see Logan’s Run
was the same evening I stepped into the torn hem of my nightgown
and tumbled down the stairs at university housing,
then jumped up like Lazarus or Chevy Chase playing Ford.
She says she didn’t realize the movie would disturb me,
the floating young adults zapped into sanctuary, the oddly
unsettling Farrah Fawcett cameo, menace and machines.
This was supposed to be a sonnet about having to be too
scrappy for my own good, wasting my scrappiness before
I really needed it, but as my high school friend’s father would
say about most anything, it builds character, and it’s true
that I have character coming out of my ears, out of the holes
in my clothes, character tumbling down stairs, jumping
back up, watching in horror, living to tell.
How Wondrous Strange to Be in a Body
(for Ashley David)
You might as well know, my son says while looking at a transforming robot, that his
legs open up. He flips open compartments on the thighs, revealing nothing.
Later I sit on a camping chair in the backyard, after the two irises have bloomed,
but before the mosquitoes have come out for the year. I blow bubbles for him, and
he chases them with a metal spoon. Make more villains! he cries. I am wheezing,
like the dying mother from My Life As a Dog. Mine is only newly hatched asthma.
Pollen. Though come to think of it, once as a teenager I complained about
something to my mother, saying that I was going to die. Yes, she said. You are.
(Might as well know.)
*
Who are you?
this light
these leaves
happy shrieks of children carried on breeze
mourning doves calling
leaf shadows
whatever poor spirit
is trapped in the myrtle
*
On the walk to preschool I'm telling my son how some people plan their flowers for
maximum blooming—spacing out the daffodils, the irises, the rose. He asks if we
can tap trees for sap sometime. I think he saw it on PBS. I tell him that that happens
mostly in the northeastern United States. "New England, it's called." I'm imagining
he hasn't been there, but he was an embryo there. In Vermont ... the woman who
wants to practice her sound balancing ... she has me lie down in the meditation hut
while she taps at tuning forks over my chakras. She says that's something is stuck
in my second chakra, a blockage ... tapping, tuning in, kneeling over my pelvis.
Then I feel a whoosh and she falls back on her heels. After that, the implantation
happens. I notice the spotting, putting it together later. I don't tell my son this on our
walk. He stands up from his stroller to adjust the stuffed cloth tail he's pinned to the
back of his pants. Blue with white spots.
Trying to Write a Poem While Reading the Children’s Encyclopedia
Mammals all have similar skeletons. . . . The ribcage holds the tiger’s lungs in place.
In graduate school I dated a large mammal
who could fit my whole fist in his mouth,
which, I’ll be honest, was more fun
than I’d had in a long time.
I was a smaller mammal then,
burrowing under the covers and dreaming
when the large mammal would leave to play basketball
with a poetry book in his pocket.
Some Meat for Your Trouble
The brain is very plastic, the woman
says on the podcast. Everything changes it—
anger, yes, but also taking a walk or a deep
breath or reading a book. It’s a learning
machine. I visualize dancing on my drive
back home, and I change my brain
into the brain of someone who dances
in her mind as she drives.
A woman writes a book about how she knew
she was an animal when the hot flashes burned
the rest of the bullshit away. I knew I was
an animal when cells implanted in my uterus
and grew into another, when the nurse pushed
in the fluids and I felt a sea change, before suddenly
vomiting. My body did that without me. Someone
sends me Christ as a tiger with meat for a heart.
It’s true the tiger has meat for a heart, but so do I.
Joanna Penn Cooper is the author of The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis
(Brooklyn Arts Press), What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press), and Crown (Ravenna
Press), as well as several chapbooks. Joanna's recent chapbooks are Wild
Apples: A Flash Memoir Collection with Writing Prompts and a collaboration with
Todd J. Colby, Comfort Event (both from Ethel). She is currently working on a
full-length collection of flash memoir pieces dealing with motherhood, origins,
and power. She lives in Durham, NC. She teaches writing classes and provides
editorial and coaching support to writers through her business Muse Writing &
Creative Support.