Room Service Pleasure Circus
I peek——vision sleep-blurred——
breezy curtains billow and push
a last-night man inside the room
widening our door
voilà a trolley cart, uniformed deliveryman,
handle in hand, warm scents—
buttered breakfast across my isle——
terraceward. They and he beckon me rise
crisp, slippery stretches, I’m languorous
from wild clouds of evening
prop an elbow, glide
I’m horizontal pirouette on pillow
tangle of sheet round
my still-warm feet. I land.
Glinting silver cloche,
sunrise pries my other eye
I roll. In concerto with the cart
wheels. Money presses flesh
low thank you, sir.
Later, this affair will disappear
easier than it appeared and, against
soiled platters piled like pennies
along exterior hallways, my eyes
and the door blink.
Nature Poem
I stopped forcing myself to zoo ages ago, the children little still, once we saw a giraffe alone,
enclosed, a concrete stretch to a last leaf, twitching painfully on its final branch of the only tree.
How cute clotted sap-like between our teeth. How the throng shuffled on, disappointed as all
hell, to the next performance. I know trees remember and mourn.
I doubt the power of prayer like I doubt the promise of zoologists or the purity of a priest. I don’t
doubt torturing chimps proves science’s flawed nature. I understand wanting to save artifacts
over refugees. How it’s a question of innocence. We left Afghanistan and that is not my problem.
It’s leaving women unarmed and untrained. Like me.
I’d save one mangy beast over ten wailing grandfathers or any carload of evacuees. Madame
Pélicot is evidence of man’s in-innocence. I stutter.
How God himself chose the animals over man, save Noah, his slave. Leave the Getty
its watery reservoirs for our fires. My temperatures rise, my larynx is sap-filled.
I walk with thoughts of caged songbirds, leukemia-producing wires criss-crossing above me,
in my neighborhood’s asphalted park, my mind sticky with power surges and failures.
Boys on bicycles burst through oak trunks, their sneakers’ rubber meeting black bitumen,
practically screaming steam.
They see past me—not before I see their eyes doubt my innocence too—to my little
mutt trotting along in her oblivion, and they holler, Not the dog! I don’t want to hit the dog.
Andréa Ferrell Gannon, MFA, is a memoirist, a mother, a native Californian, and the daughter of an English immigrant and Lakota father. She taught HS French and Spanish for years, then English to immigrants and refugees. Find her in The Washington Post, The Coachella Review, Best of Kelp, GRXL, Poet Lore, The Prose Poem, Cultural Daily, and Best American Poetry. Her favorite revenge story involves Red Cloud hacking off an enemy’s arm to wave across the battlefield and taunt, “You want this?”
