A Poem by Scott Abels

Imagine an ambulance
coming for you.

Goodbye, awkward mascot.
You touched your hair too much.

Sports fans
accept a loss forever.

There’s Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
and there’s The Blues.

*

Pumpkin and watermelon
are often mixed up

until they start growing
a pumpkin or watermelon.

A 9-11 operator in Kansas
is telling a teen not to whine.

She is past
the age where she
would swallow a penny.

**

In a garden they practice pulling
wounded marines out of harm’s way.

You are wearing
massive headphones.

A well-reasoned yellow lab specializes
in finding explosives and is fed up.

These eggs are getting cold,
which slows what eating alone looks like.

There is no call for help
plagiarizing your mother.

***

With your reasons and details
you can draft a thesis sentence:

This is a great
salad pumpkin:

This is the postcard that I would send:
The bologna sandwiches were terrible:

The dog does not have lion’s blood:
Accept loss forever.

****

So someone offers you more
than the value of your car
and you are having a fantasy.
Dear Senator, starch to sugar,
slavery is never an analogy.
The dog absolutely lunges forward.
This is the stick used in the crime.
Please help people concentrate better.
A mechanic talks to us about
having problems down the road.
Senator, your mother
and I love you very much.
The city didn’t change us.
I have eaten the pancakes
that you sent in the mail
driving the Subaru
so slow and so cold
through the garden, and I am still
looking out the window. War
was never an appropriate metaphor.
You might find life on an island
different. You know, the ocean.

*****

There is a well
above an aquifer in Nebraska.

The list is “practically endless,”
a domestic goose chase,
which is formative.

For example, the Swedes
are everywhere
in popular culture.

Forty-seven Senate Republicans
send a school letterman instead.

I hold out for Stockholm,
Sweden complete.

Or a trip down the Platte River
with teachers.

******

What have I become,
my Swedish friend?
A trip down the Platte River with toddlers.
My recipe for faux caviar is
basically buckshot and
a wet rat nest,
and I’ve done it in a beautiful way.
There is a sweet spot right
between Groundhog’s Day and Valentine’s Day,
but that is not where we are from.
Do not be like your dad.

*******

Mystics, I give it all up.
It’s not like this guy
is lost in the desert.
My son is washing the family Prius
which takes play
out of children’s hands.
Someone in Kansas is missing
a set of bicycle pedals,
and every night
one pair of pedals goes missing
to replace someone
else’s stolen bicycle pedals.
We could end this entire sequence by
sending a pair of bicycle pedals to Kansas.
If it takes love,
I am willing to show you
which ones are the elderberries,
and if it comes to that,
that dead bat smell
was only some urine in the garden.

---

Scott Abels is the author of New City (BlazeVOX, 2015) and Rambo Goes to Idaho (BlazeVOX, 2011) as well as several chapbooks.  He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Boise State University.  After many years living and teaching in Mexico and Hawai’i, he now lives on the family homestead near Stanton, Nebraska, where he edits the online poetry journal Country Music.