SAFE GRAVY

Alexandra van de Kamp

                                           —thanks to iPhone autocorrect

I was trying to say safe travels

I was trying to type to a sister boarding a plane,

a sister with a sad way of arranging her face.

I was trying to do justice to the August trees, to the way

we drown in our thoughts

a little each day.

I’ve lost count of how many times

list has become lust—bees

became bras, and fees, frogs.

I was trying to communicate my impressions:

—the wind disco-ing between panic and glee

—the articles on sloths I consume

like piping hot Darjeeling tea.

Did you know a sloth takes one month

to digest a leaf?

And I try not to mind when love becomes live

because isn’t living a constant slipping?  A to-ing

and fro-ing around love, and its many misspellings?

The other day, you became bayou—the self as slow-moving,

murky, and rather sloppy outlet.  I had to pause a bit,

consider the geography and humid ramifications.

But I admit I must quibble when fibs in the news

fiddle with their bibs, drooling on all of us

with their vertiginous spit!  Fib, fib, fib!

This world a masterful whodunnit, with its

hiccupping detectives and missing witnesses;

its opaque, shifting definitions.

And just now, my sister’s name, Vikki,

was 'corrected' to bikini.  And all I could think

was of Gidget, the 1959 surfer movie starring Sandra Dee,

and how, in a matter of 95 minutes, teen angst and major

life decisions can be solved perfectly along an endless stretch

of California beach.

"Safe Gravy" was published in Jet Fuel Review.  A breakthrough to discover that words based on an annoying feature of my cellphone could be a poem published in a journal I respect. Moreover, when I read this poem in public, it often makes people laugh, which affirms how much I enjoy introducing humor into poetry; it unlocks emotional terrain and thoughts I would not have otherwise expressed, and widens the poem's world.