by Robbie Q. Telfer
The Windshield Effect
The news isn’t good
it isn’t evil either
the news vomits 58 minutes
of real doomblood but on a
lighter note, here is video
of a rat wearing
a tiger costume
good night, Chicago.
An old commie organizing tactic
goes you frame every struggle
with victories and hope,
like the only reason we eat
sandwiches is the bread.
My partner has Celiacs
and sometimes gawks at me
like a pervert when I eat
clearly delicious breads.
don’t know what we got till it’s gone
They have recently discovered
dozens of different aquatic fungi
at the bottom of the Great Lakes
and immediately sandwiched their
conservation in the gluten free
bullshit of “who knows what
disease these fungi might cure.”
I understand you need to get funding
and I understand lots of people
don’t see worth in something unless
it cures someone they know personally
of the thing that is killing them.
Something people say to get you
to like bats is “they can eat 1000
mosquitoes in an hour” which is
probably impossible and also
shouldn’t be the only thing that
keeps the little Caesar inside you
from thumbsing down all bats
in our big blue coliseum.
Oh my god it was fucking huge.
What was?
The spider.
Oh yeah like how big?
Like this ( ).
So like two inches?
Yeah. Fucking huge.
Did you walk away from it on your comparatively enormous legs?
No, I had to smoosh it with a Boden catalog.
Cool.
The news about the bugs
it isn’t good.
This will be calamitous
to us – our crops, food webs.
And yet here I am
telling you that that’s
not a good reason
to save them.
If you don’t want
your species to go
extinct, is the god
you pray to a hope
you will one day
cure another species’
hemorrhoids?
I hated Obamacare
but then I got to
live a little longer
and now I love it.
What do you call a
protest vote where
you vote for the candidate
who most perfectly
reflects your heretofore
unelectable worldview?
A vote.
Anyway, I vote for bugs.
Bee Bee Goose
Bones have a way about them a goose skeleton tells us things about the goose who once wrapped her meat and guts around it we are given maybe a hundred geese per lifetime to get cooked and now yours and mine are simmering in the same pan, our goosey juices commingling we reach into our stuffed neck holes and remove each others’ wishbones to make the same wish and given this shared predicament I will fight for us together although if we get out of this you’re still not allowed in my WoW party. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what an enemy was until after I thought you were it. I don’t know what that makes us now, maybe the end of our film we are both in bloodslathered uniforms and we give each other a battle-weary nod and smirk and then the crane shot of the battlefield and it’s full of corpses but, like, symbolic ones, like the war is, like, a metaphor for, like, junior high but also white supremacy. All these poems we are writing will rise up into a fist of cartoon bees and all the public will see is the punch they will never know that individual bees can have individual beefs and still effectively get shit done. Groupthink and unity are born from the same queen but one is a drone and one is a worker. Bees don’t have internal skeletons. Cartoon bee fists do.
20/20
We’d appreciate the vision gift more
were there only
20 sets of eyes to share
with the rest of the planet.
You’d get 20 minutes with
a set a life a time
greatly celebrated mythologized
passage rite
entire master’s degrees
devoted to the study of
what we do with our
Eye Time.
Don’t just look at
boobs they will
warn us.
Don’t stare at the sun
old warm friend.
Don’t waste your
20, what colors
what to see
what squash soup
looks like as it disappears
into us
I didn’t know orange
could do that
radio shows
dedicated to describing
our see time
our 20 minutes of fame
anthologies of the
greatest compiled and taught
of course you can
be secret
you can be private
people will respect it
it’s your choice.
But also it’s illegal
to make people
nonconsensually describe.
If we die before
we get our 20
we are called
Currents or Breezes or Gravities
and when we get to heaven
we get to pick which
experience of our lives
we get to see
for 20 minutes
before we return to
a sightless eternity
for those of us
who believe.
There’s a second set
of 20 eyes, of course,
so 40 more
so 80 total
in the world.
The second set
are not shared until
the users die.
They are the Guardians
of the Shared Eyes.
Each Guardian gets
one eye for life
to see with
and another to guard.
Guardians move in
pairs with the sets
to keep half an eye on each
other so the shared eyes
don’t get separated
or lost or accidentally sat on
or whatever. The Guardians
became necessary when
shitty rich people tried to
hoard the eyes for themselves.
Luckily everyone else quickly
rose up and ate
all of those shitty rich people
except for the eyes
and set up the Shared Eye Charter
and Guardians are
selected because they’re the ones
least impressed
with sight. After their 20
they’re like meh
seeing isn’t everything.
Anyway, since I’m making
the rules here we are
both one-eyed Guardians and
we’re paired with the Brad Eyes Set
named after the Great Brad, obviously,
and we see each other every day
as we pass our one precious
globe from person to giddy person
giving the standard spiel
“Don’t just look at boobs.
Don’t stare into the sun.
May you see what you need.”
and we see each other everyday
bound by responsibility and expectation
it’s not uncommon for Guardians
to fall in love or make out
during their lunch break
scientific curiosity
but we made a kid too
who like all here can’t see
and we describe our version
of reality to her best we can.
Would we give her both our
Guardian eyes so she
could luxuriate in depth perception?
Of course not
we take our responsibility seriously
and even if we did
I wouldn’t mention it here
I’m no snitch.
Robbie Q. Telfer has performed and taught in hundreds of venues and institutions around the world. A co-founder of the Encyclopedia Show, he’s been an individual finalist at the National Poetry Slam and has a collection of poetry from Write Bloody Publishing. A member of the internationally-renowned teaching artist collective Project VOICE, he is currently an environmental educator at the Morton Arboretum outside of Chicago.