TORI AMOS NURSING THE PIG

                     by Maya Jewell Zeller

I didn’t know anything yet

I was fifteen and what I knew was next to nothing

I had gathered my father’s Camel Cash and mailed it
for a portable CD player

I could plug in my headphones and keep the music to myself
in that loud house
of smoke and hamburger meat
and a crying sister and my one window that looked out to the moon

It seemed the moon was always full so I joined the Columbia House
Music Club and they would mail me fourteen CDs now and then I could pay
$1.99 per CD if I bought eight in the next year

and I ordered with abandon, or what I thought was abandon,
Wilson Phillips and Mariah Carey
and the Eurythmics, and then Tori Amos, who I’d never heard
on the radio but who I thought looked cool, and her album
came with her nursing a pig and I thought Oh God, exactly—    

I didn’t know anything yet but I thought nursing a pig
was probably somewhere in my future
and I took my Discman to the barn and laid there in my hay fort
and thought about that little mouth,
its tiny teeth and black eyes and probing snout
and how Tori looked so blissed out in her open leather jacket
or was it a blouse and how she sat on the porch in her rocking chair
with her shotgun and the mud all over her leg and she looked like
she was saying Go ahead and try me, you bastards, which is what I thought
all day in school and didn’t say—      


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photo by Kathryn Nuernberger

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the poetry collections Rust Fish and Yesterday, the Bees. She is poetry editor of Spokane press Scablands Books, fiction editor of Crab Creek Review, and assistant professor at Central Washington University. She lives in the Inland Northwest with her family. Follow her on Twitter @MayaJZeller and visit her website: mayajewellzeller.com for more information.