Gwen Hart
We Loved Them, and She Didn’t
One Saturday in 1985, my mother refused
to drive us to the gas station convenience store
to buy Garbage Pail Kids cards to trade
at school. “They’re disgusting,”
she complained, pointing to Brainy Jane’s
cracked-open skull and Clogged Duane
screaming as he was sucked down the drain.
She failed to see the value in purpled Varicose Wayne
or Handy Randy reaching his fingers through his face
to wiggle them like teeth inside his open mouth.
There was no place in our house, she explained,
for Tom Tom, who twisted off his own head
in order to beat it bloody like a drum.
She didn’t understand that to get through
the ugliness of childhood, to swim—not sink--
like Potty Scotty, to survive, against all odds,
like Oozy Suzy, whose wax head, tipped
with a lit wick, melted and ran hot down
the length of her body, or Adam Bomb, whose crown
exploded into a bright orange mushroom cloud,
was an excruciating task, made easier
if there were someone to laugh at,
someone like Jack Splat, printed flat
on a trading card, with a cartoon grin,
missing teeth, and green snot on his face--
someone not you, not even real, but still
your very own, to keep, to trade, to tear in half,
to shout at--Aw, gross!--as a spout of guts
ruptured across the paper, and you bled
all of your feelings out, and slid them carefully
into a three-ring binder with clear plastic sleeves--
three faces to a line, three lines to a page,
smoothing down the emptiness, the loneliness,
the loathing, and the rage.
Surviving the Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail, the game that traumatized countless children of the '80s and '90s is now available online for free from the Internet Archive. –Time.com, January 2015
My brother and I drove oxen for hours that summer, taking turns
strategizing, curled up in our father’s imitation leather den chair,
sucking on grape popsicles while trying to get past the non-potable water,
wagon fires, and swollen rivers. The main life lesson was that no matter
how many yokes of oxen you travel with, how many sets of clothing
and stores of food you lay by, how skilled you are at shooting
rabbits and bears, no matter if you are a banker from Boston,
a carpenter from Tennessee, a farmer from Illinois, or a sixth-grader from Ohio,
you can expect to face a number of very difficult trials: You can get stuck
for days in a blizzard, try to subsist on melted snow, burn buffalo chips for heat,
get up to let the dog out, attempt to ford the river, opt to take the toll road,
turn the air conditioning up, come down with dysentery, choke on squirrel meat,
break an axle in the mud, run out of bullets outside of Ft. Hall, hire an Indian guide,
pause to answer the phone to assure your mother you are still alive (although barely),
trade your winter clothing for more oxen, trade your oxen for more wagon wheels,
break your arm, break your other arm, break your leg, contract typhoid fever,
order a Domino’s pizza, check your progress on the map, crack open
a Coca-Cola, infect your companions with typhoid fever,
try to survive on starvation rations, and, finally, come to understand
that all of your choices are like spokes in a wagon wheel leading—not
back to Independence, Missouri, or onward to Willamette, Oregon--
but straight to the heart of suburbia, where, in the end, you die,
tilted back in your father’s chair, with your left hand burnt orange
from emptying a bag of Doritos, your right hand curled like a claw on the space bar,
and your bootless, sunburned heels buried deep in the wall-to-wall carpeting.
Thriller
Lamar Jackson claimed
he was Michael Jackson’s cousin.
It was 1983, and I believed him,
even though we lived in Cleveland,
and I’d been to his house
with the gray asbestos siding
and the lopsided garage.
When Lamar asked me
to be his fake girlfriend
in our grade school re-enactment
of the Thriller video
in the gymnasium,
my heart turned
into a fistful of sequins.
Lamar grabbed my hand
and we ran for our lives,
Kangaroos sneakers squeaking
across the polished wooden floor.
We screamed as our friends,
who had become zombies
and ghouls overnight,
stumbled after us, their eyes
rolled up in their heads,
their feet dragging, but gaining
ground with every step.
I can picture us now--
a black boy and a white girl--
locking arms, turning back-to-back,
up against an angry,
encircling mob. We didn’t know
what we were playing at.
We didn’t know why
when they chased us down
it felt so real.
One Saturday in 1985, my mother refused
to drive us to the gas station convenience store
to buy Garbage Pail Kids cards to trade
at school. “They’re disgusting,”
she complained, pointing to Brainy Jane’s
cracked-open skull and Clogged Duane
screaming as he was sucked down the drain.
She failed to see the value in purpled Varicose Wayne
or Handy Randy reaching his fingers through his face
to wiggle them like teeth inside his open mouth.
There was no place in our house, she explained,
for Tom Tom, who twisted off his own head
in order to beat it bloody like a drum.
She didn’t understand that to get through
the ugliness of childhood, to swim—not sink--
like Potty Scotty, to survive, against all odds,
like Oozy Suzy, whose wax head, tipped
with a lit wick, melted and ran hot down
the length of her body, or Adam Bomb, whose crown
exploded into a bright orange mushroom cloud,
was an excruciating task, made easier
if there were someone to laugh at,
someone like Jack Splat, printed flat
on a trading card, with a cartoon grin,
missing teeth, and green snot on his face--
someone not you, not even real, but still
your very own, to keep, to trade, to tear in half,
to shout at--Aw, gross!--as a spout of guts
ruptured across the paper, and you bled
all of your feelings out, and slid them carefully
into a three-ring binder with clear plastic sleeves--
three faces to a line, three lines to a page,
smoothing down the emptiness, the loneliness,
the loathing, and the rage.
Surviving the Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail, the game that traumatized countless children of the '80s and '90s is now available online for free from the Internet Archive. –Time.com, January 2015
My brother and I drove oxen for hours that summer, taking turns
strategizing, curled up in our father’s imitation leather den chair,
sucking on grape popsicles while trying to get past the non-potable water,
wagon fires, and swollen rivers. The main life lesson was that no matter
how many yokes of oxen you travel with, how many sets of clothing
and stores of food you lay by, how skilled you are at shooting
rabbits and bears, no matter if you are a banker from Boston,
a carpenter from Tennessee, a farmer from Illinois, or a sixth-grader from Ohio,
you can expect to face a number of very difficult trials: You can get stuck
for days in a blizzard, try to subsist on melted snow, burn buffalo chips for heat,
get up to let the dog out, attempt to ford the river, opt to take the toll road,
turn the air conditioning up, come down with dysentery, choke on squirrel meat,
break an axle in the mud, run out of bullets outside of Ft. Hall, hire an Indian guide,
pause to answer the phone to assure your mother you are still alive (although barely),
trade your winter clothing for more oxen, trade your oxen for more wagon wheels,
break your arm, break your other arm, break your leg, contract typhoid fever,
order a Domino’s pizza, check your progress on the map, crack open
a Coca-Cola, infect your companions with typhoid fever,
try to survive on starvation rations, and, finally, come to understand
that all of your choices are like spokes in a wagon wheel leading—not
back to Independence, Missouri, or onward to Willamette, Oregon--
but straight to the heart of suburbia, where, in the end, you die,
tilted back in your father’s chair, with your left hand burnt orange
from emptying a bag of Doritos, your right hand curled like a claw on the space bar,
and your bootless, sunburned heels buried deep in the wall-to-wall carpeting.
Thriller
Lamar Jackson claimed
he was Michael Jackson’s cousin.
It was 1983, and I believed him,
even though we lived in Cleveland,
and I’d been to his house
with the gray asbestos siding
and the lopsided garage.
When Lamar asked me
to be his fake girlfriend
in our grade school re-enactment
of the Thriller video
in the gymnasium,
my heart turned
into a fistful of sequins.
Lamar grabbed my hand
and we ran for our lives,
Kangaroos sneakers squeaking
across the polished wooden floor.
We screamed as our friends,
who had become zombies
and ghouls overnight,
stumbled after us, their eyes
rolled up in their heads,
their feet dragging, but gaining
ground with every step.
I can picture us now--
a black boy and a white girl--
locking arms, turning back-to-back,
up against an angry,
encircling mob. We didn’t know
what we were playing at.
We didn’t know why
when they chased us down
it felt so real.
Gwen Hart teaches writing at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Her second poetry collection, The Empress of Kisses, is the 2015 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize winner from Texas Review Press.