Unnatural Disasters
Remember, in the days before gender reveal parties, when expectant parents would say they didn’t care if the baby was a boy or a girl, as long as it was healthy. Ten fingers and ten toes and all that breeder bullshit. They didn’t mean it, of course, in the same way that saying being nominated for an award is as much of an honor as winning. It’s not, and anyone who says it is is a fucking liar.
One of the fires reducing the Pacific coast to ash and rubble is rumored to have been started at one such unnecessary affair, pyrotechnics gone wrong in the name of announcing the sex of a fetus. Fireworks in a landscape as dry as Mike Pence’s epididymis. You can’t cure stupid, but you may be able to persuade it to sacrifice itself to the flames, to burn alive, to smoke dance, to paint the sky red.
In an ocean as warm as reheated soup, tropical depressions and disturbances whip themselves into feverish frenzies. They barely speak to each other in their hurry to make landfall, wash away any trace of survival. The wet and wild gender reveal party has its names picked out long before the due date arrives. Meet Sally who wants to tickle the Panhandle. Say hello to Paulette and Rene, neither of whom can speak a word of French.
There’s Teddy, who has been researching what it means to be non-binary. Vicky with a “y” not an “i” or, heaven forbid, two “e”s, is desperate to find her birth mother and plans to look in (and devastate) as many places as she can on the way. The calendar says it’s only the middle of September, but these uninvited guests don’t pay attention to such details, show up early, late, any damn time they please.
Dreaming Dead
This is the way it will happen. First, a thirst and then swallowing back the menace of acid reflux from a much too late spicy Indian dinner. Palak paneer, samosas, garlic naan. Reaching
for the glass mug of room temperature mint tea on the bedside table to tamp it down, rinse it away. Also, too late because it is the long anticipated result of an internal flaw exacerbated
by external forces. Say, Amy Coney Barrett. The simplest of math equations, easier to tally than ballots in Florida. Bloating, night sweats, memory loss, fuzzy vision, a cracked tooth,
joints as stiff as erections used to be, the insistence on always being right. There is brief illumination from the oversized face of an Indiglo watch, confirmed by an iPhone screen. Ashen as oneof the tiny lizards, scampering towards and then away from the sudden flick of a light switch, trapped in the house too long. The last slow leak of breath that makes the dog whimper as she
does at something of that pitch, just soft enough not to wake Rick. When he calms down sufficiently to remember the laptop password, he laughs and cries at the updated will, revised a few days ago
to include leaving the ceramic camel and its camel-related ephemera to Chris, and the vintage, miniature, cream-colored, swiveling, black and white, table-top Sharp television set to Dana.
Gregg Shapiro is the author of nine books including the forthcoming poetry chapbook Refrain in Light (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2023). Recent/forthcoming lit-mag publications include The Penn Review, RFD, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Mollyhouse, Impossible Archetype, and Panoplyzine, as well as the anthology Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville, 2023). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.