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— 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.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
|