Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Hamster Thrown from Monster Truck
This is the headline from The Onion
we love best.
What does this say
about us?
At least our schadenfreude’s minimalist?
Neither of us ever had a hamster
for a pet.
Or even knew one as a friend’s
pet
or the teacher’s pet: a hamster for the masses
of a third grade class, for instance;
nor do we know anything of gerbils.
Not on their own account,
neither their relationship to hamsters.
But monster trucks—
these we’ve seen.
Monsters of all models, guzzlers
on the byways of our humble town,
rumbling above us at the stoplight
like a frisky two-story building,
charging forward at the change
on super-sized tires,
swinging, sometimes, from the bumper
a pair of balls.
The hamster’s monster truck has thrown him
for a loop.
We think it probably shook him up.
He took the last lap of the treadmill track too fast!
Fans in the bleachers standing
on their seats,
the sun a beer-haze through their shades.
We hope the hamster’s landed
on his feet.
Kathleen Winter’s second book, I will not kick my friends, won the 2017 Elixir Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters first book award. She was the fall 2015 Dobie Paisano Fellow, selected by the University of Texas at Austin and Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, The New Republic, The Yale Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Sonoma County, California. (updated 4/2017)