Talking

Courtney Bush

Leo knows numbers are emotional but can’t explain 

Instead he writes til til til in black paint

Most poems want way too much 

To feel, to know the feeling, to know what it means to feel it, then to learn

It won’t happen in this world

With its 9 circles of hell 

And angels having numeric values

The second lowest order of angels

An embarrassment

And I love to say “why do you hate me” like I’m a baby bird

And you’re my mother

That guy always has egret feathers in his hand

I was on my knees laying small cots on the linoleum 

When through the tempered glass I saw you seeing me in the middle of my work

My love for you was like singing insofar as it made no sense 

Because as I understand it

It making no sense to sing is what singing is about

Minushka entered the chat meowing by Jonas’s window 

Who explained it’s a sad sound but I don’t know why she’s sad

And showed me a drawing of a box of fruit in a market

And said his brain gave him the idea

The children are beginning to understand a lot happens there

I had a dream in my head

A fortune, a prong 

I didn’t tell them when we looked at portraits

We’d have to believe in regret

Amanda often works on a conceptual plane

I tell her mother as she empties huge cans of Hunts tomatoes into a blender

About the fifty or so dandelion puffs she put on a large leaf

Like a plate and explained the people who came to the playground could make wishes

And the feather and rock I removed from her shoe which made her cry

Because I didn’t even ask, she screamed, I didn’t even ask what they were for

Animals aren’t magic

John held a dead beetle up to the camera

Manipulated its wings for twenty minutes instead of talking

I tell Leo’s mother I have never met anyone like Leo because I haven’t

And she almost starts to cry because she knows what I mean

And her husband puts his hand on her shoulder

Leo said he wanted to write his autobiography:

At zero he lived near Riverside Park

At one he lived near Riverside Park

At two he thought he would always be two

I didn’t know I would ever be three, he said laughing

So he taught me how to say what being young was like

Elmo being three and a half years old

Was the bombshell of the Sesame Street Town Hall on CNN

If Elmo was my student I would observe his speech patterns

And delayed adoption of the first person pronoun instead of his name

Which would make sense for a younger child 

In Reggio Emilia they threw a system away

Without knowing what the new one would look like

Beyond the fact that we would pay attention

Honoring the basic mode of love

Taking extensive notes on the way a child responds to materials

A change of materials in response, taking more notes

And Pasolini went to school there

And he made the Trilogy of Life

And I used to joke that my dog would solve his murder

And I used to think I didn’t care about the Canterbury Tales

In the chat Leo wrote unmute

I WANT TO BE THE ONLY PERSON WHO TALKS IN THIS MEETING

TALK TO ME RIGHT NOW

Which we ignored

Then he started unmuting himself and saying “I love you”

As a form of sabotage because he knew we would be unable to ignore him

We’d have to stop and say I love you too 

We figured out why William didn’t want to talk to me anymore

He could never stop thinking how I’d soon say goodbye

The truth is I behaved in a way I don’t want to be remembered for

A fortune, a prong

Forgot to write down who wrote the poem that says 

Be something perfect that doesn’t count and change

And you do count and you do change but

That’s what I think you are

Courtney Bush is a poet, filmmaker and unemployed preschool teacher from Mississippi. Her poems have recently appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Peach Mag, and Flag+Void. She is the author of the chapbook Isn’t This Nice? (blush 2019).