Blue Failure

The gym. Milk-breathed girls sweated in their polyester,
ground pencil tips into those answer dots. That
standardized test measured aptitudes:
crafts, metallurgy, would you enjoy watching for forest fires?

Who can confuse the speed of bricks
traveling from a height you’d get arrested for
with the time it takes a car to arrive in Houston?

My results: suited to be a taxidermist.

The thing is, a gorilla weighs eight hundred pounds. That’s
an intricate set of initial cuts around the wrists,
the feet: methods and method for
how to ball straw to fill the space

inside shampooed black fur.
I felt for him, really, all that flesh thrown out,
all that staring
and being space.
Failing once, failing hugely
Stands

all day, like an extraneous nurse near the cold wall.
It’s an all day case;
the world famous thoracic surgeon
can look at the aorta his own damned self,

and what to do,
jobless,
pulling your gloves off, and the blue puffed hat?

Copyright © 2007 Cynthia Arrieu-King All rights reserved
from The Small Anything City
Dream Horse Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission