Phobias

One of the books I keep on my nightstand, within easy reach of my morning-coffee perch, is The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano. There’s a prompt for every day of the year. Four out of five times I may read the prompt and go, “Huh. That’s cool,” and move on, and I keep checking. While not all prompts will resonate at a given time, all are technically doable, and there’s a wonderful variety. It is from this book that I developed the habit of checking to see what happened on this day in history when I’m looking for a practice exercise, and also of checking Craigslist for ideas. It’s a gem with a beautifully simple format. Today’s prompt is to consider the theme “phobias,” which is something Aimee Nezhukumatathil does so interestingly in her poem, “Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.” That sounded like something I could do today, so here it is.

Any object can become a fear object:

a needle, a flower, the dark.

Not the car exactly but riding in one.

Those figures that look human, but

aren’t. Thunder, of course, and lightning.

My grandfather, anticipating this fear, would

announce, when a storm came, Angels! They

were bowling, he told us. 

Some fear books; others, amphibians.

I sometimes have nightmares about steep

slopes. Time itself, the mirror, ridicule. I

can’t help but think these go together. The

confined space. Knees, even. Whole groups

of others: men, women, beautiful women,

teenagers, children, clowns. The ill, and

doctors. Touch itself, the color white, the

color black; small and large things. Death

and dead things; the figure 8. Weight gain,

paper. School seems like an obvious choice;

I hadn’t considered the color purple. Sleep,

holes, speed.

I read the list, impressed with the specificity

of options. Admiring, even, but I wonder,

what is the word for this ever-present knot,

this constant quaking from the inside out,

easier to hide than to still? When small, I

was not afraid of most grownups, only of 

having to become one, because while it

was clear that there would be expectations,

it was not so clear what they were. A common

concern was driving, how it was that my mother

could remember every turn, mostly, to all the 

endless places we went, and still get back home.

It saddened me to know that when my turn came

behind the wheel, I would probably disappear.

Unless! I brought breadcrumbs to leave a trail,

but consider Hansel and Gretel. They were careful,

but the birds ate their intentions home. The fire

of the oven, waiting in the dark woods, this is

what kept me in knots, the way I could stumble

and be cooked alive. But it wasn’t on the list, 

so maybe I dreamed it, as with other things,

Just butterflies, the growns would say, as though what

was happening was the flutter of iridescent wings

of a colony of new-transformed lives, ready to 

fly from this body’s own dark.

Image: "Spider" by Peter Scianna on flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.0 Generic license.