Tonight's Poet Corner: Worm Blue & Fart Alligator, Part Deux

Worm Blue

by Belinda Roddie

The wristwatch coil around your
waistline measures out a deep fried
regret that's smeared across your average
face, dripping calamari battered
belligerence down the front of your
way too expensive vest, worm blue,
like a serpent drowning in a
deep puddle of sewer medication,
dissolved tablets and booze-mixed
vomit spewed from a CEO's wife's
sobbing teeth. There is no happy

margarita glass. There is no salt
satisfying enough to tingle a
twisted tongue. Just the essence of
natural financial hemorrhage as you
pay the bill for overcooked steak
melting in garlic soup, the coins
squeaking against the little black tray
holding a handful of your fortune
for the boy in an apron
spooning oatmeal into his
gluten-intolerant mother's mouth.

Fart Alligator, Part Deux
by Belinda Roddie

Sweet fart alligator, you and I
were not acquainted for many years.
I am a master of pen and paper. You are a
reptilian wonder of fragrant flatulence,
providing the perfume of the bayou, the
eau de marais, if you will, the
disregarded crusader of the
Louisiana wetlands. Truth be

told, we were never
meant to know each other, especially in this
chaotic classroom, this red and gold
concrete and plaster beauty with noble
purple-streaked whiteboards, round
tables, and a very small
collection of books painstakingly picked to
pique a second grade girl's wonder. But it was one

fateful day, ah, yes, in a San Rafael December,
that I heard your name. Yes, your scaly highness,
squeaking melodies from beneath your tail,
disturbing the surface of the Southern marshes. We met
when a child with olive skin, dark hair, and a neon
pink headband used your title as nothing more than an

insult - a taunt, a jab, a barb, tipped and
jousted toward a mentor, a hardly seasoned
teacher with a Hanukkah book under one
arm, and a navy blue sweatshirt
contrasting with the white polo collar
cropped against a defiant girl's chin.
She called me a fart alligator. She does not understand.

True, she gets points for originality. I could
hardly fathom another concocting such a name
to lob like a bouncy ball against my back
(since she talked behind it, you see). And oh,
beloved prehistoric wind breaker,
trapped in your hole so the
smell does not frustrate your confidants,
stranded in the muck - that is
when we connected. Even though I

have no greenish brown scales to boast on my
skin, nor a regal muddy head and flaring snout,
and no reputation of noisemaking from anywhere but my
own loquacious tongue - I can understand you now.
And though I may have reprimanded that child,
twisting her shoulders so that her head sat properly
on her crane neck, I did laugh. For you and I are now
linked within this world, nay,
strung between the very constellations that
boast of upside down chairs and belts and dog stars,
but nothing celestial that recognizes you.

I ask, dearest fart alligator, that you not be
injured by this seven-year-old human's misguided and
ignorant words. Let yourself be happy,
swiveling in your swamp, cutting your
cajun cheese to your cold-blooded heart's content.
I'll only giggle at the dinner table, then
think of how I can sing praise to you, the
artist of ripping one, and mightily.
Perhaps I'll make diagrams, or tell stories,
to glorify you. And

in the end, we shall have the last hurrah.
And the same goes for your
cousin, the toot crocodile. I hear he is
endangered these days. Do send him my
thoughts and well-wishes as I
cavort about the schoolgrounds,
waiting to be called a belch caiman.