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Beth Ann Fennelly
Turning Twenty-Nine
You thought by now you’d be wiser,
not still falling for the old x=y.
You wonder how you’d do if you were
the last person on earth and had to found
a new civilization: Could you describe
how an engine works? A radio? A light bulb?
You repeat the word bulb. Bulb, bulb, bulb.
You stop in the nick of time. Time nicks us all
sooner or later; that’s democracy.
Once you were in Russia, and a woman
cut your hair. She bent you over a tub,
noosed you in a towel, and snipped away.
It was the best cut you ever got.
You drank tumblers of vodka with her husband.
The next day, your last in that country,
you took a bus to the Hermitage
and puked in the john until closing.
You didn’t see a painting. Not one.
Somehow, you’re this kind of person.
It’s hard to believe, though you were voted
Most Likely to Yak in Russia’s Best Museum
with Good Hair. Don’t you hate it
when high school’s right? Don’t you hate it
when 2nd person swishes its tongue inside your ear?
You wonder how you’d do in solitary confinement.
You can’t do long division in your head.
You don’t know isometric exercises.
Edison’s last words: “It is beautiful over there.”
Yours: “These pretzels are making me thirsty.”
You wonder if suffering makes people
more compassionate. Coleridge, caring
for his typhoid son, wrote by candlelight
twenty-three nights into the fever:
Turned a poor (very large & beautiful)
Moth out of the Window in a hard Shower
of rain to save it from the Flames!
That’s one kind of person.
When you visit your father who is dying
at last, and he turns, death-dumb,
and whispers, “Did you bring Beth Ann?”
You say, “No.” That’s another.
BETH ANN FENNELLY is the winner of a 2001 Pushcart Prize, an Illinois
Arts Council grant, and The Kenyon Review Prize for Open House,
which will be published by Zoo Press in March 2002. The recipient of
a number of fellowships, including those to the Sewanee Writer’s
Conference and the MacDowell Colony, she has published work in The
Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly. Currently she
is an assistant professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
“Turning Twenty-Nine” appears in our Autumn
2001 issue.
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