Puberty
I call my film Still Life
with Platypus and Wind Chimes
because the us in platypus
and the idea of a marsupial's
pouch are both symbolic.
At least that's how I pitched it
to the studio. But I lied—the film
has no platypus, no symbols, no wind
chimes. Just a twelve year-old kid
in a greasy spoon somewhere
out West, patties of meat being
spatulaed off the spitting grill,
cigarette haze encasing the diners,
and he sees the frantic trapped
moth banging against the screen,
and we see the moth in extreme
close up, trying to get out, back
into the sweet evening air,
so the kid bolts from the red
leather booth, his family
eating chicken-fried steaks,
and makes for the screen door,
pushes it open, gently
flicks the moth back out
into Wyoming or Colorado,
sees it ascend, sees the black
beak of a bird zap it away.
Then we cut from his stunned
face to the busty waitress:
the banana split is coming.
Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved
Hayden's Ferry Review, 2004
Runner-up, Indiana Review Poetry Prize, 2004, Denise Duhamel, judge
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