Dana Roeser

But Then I Turned Into my Evil Twin: Kindness and Ecstasy | Dana Roeser

“I am so desperate for that vaccine

            I’d knock down an old person

to get it,” someone once said. In “Kindness

            and Ecstasy,” Zornberg tells

us that according to Midrash author Rashi 

Noah was loath to enter the

ark and loath to exit it. His time within

was spent in “kindness,”

in servitude to the animals,

and without sex. By the time

he entered the ark, the flood 

was already

in progress—people had begun

“to call human beings

and natural phenonema by God’s

name.” I did not just

call the Department of Health

            and yell at them because

I “know” they are throwing away

            doses and why won’t

they give me one? And now that

            we’re on the topic,

why is our state not following

            the CDC recommendation to

administer the vaccine to everyone

sixty-five and over? But, wait, 

that was “somebody,” not speaker 

of this poem. Somebody

who is in a perpetual rage.

I was riding my bicycle down

Sycamore Street. The name annoyed me,

            because I was always 

trying to call it Robertson Street. But

            I love the road—

it is a tree-lined shortcut that

            goes at a slant, defies the grid. 

That was in warm weather

when I rode my red bicycle 

everywhere. I don’t know 

what the Covid death toll 

was that day, only that the trees 

were glittering in the sun, 

and that suddenly my body 

tried to shut 

like a clam shell—I felt my chest 

trying to slam up 

to my forehead. Which was a 

separate scenario 

from the one featuring a large 

silver pinball, loose 

in my alimentary canal—or a 

eustachian tube—

that woke me 

in the night—

Covid exaggerates everything.

Covid exaggerates 

loneliness. Once, after my 

husband left, 

I stood in my kitchen looking out 

at the yard. My body pressed 

on me like it was hot

metal,

close-fitting and sharp, and I 

wanted to leave it there, 

wanted to walk

out of it into the yard, 

wild violets murmuring. Cross living room, 

cross deck, down three 

wide steps, cross patio. Remove the flaming 

shirt of Nessus, drop it in

the violets, the bright grass.

At last—

incorporeal.                

When I told Deb, ever patient—

I didn’t know naturopaths did psych!—

she prescribed

ignatia amara, a homeopathic—

for grief. It contains 

a trace of strychnine.       

“A fundamental disaster 

has befallen the language powers 

of human beings,” Zornberg 

writes. Or at least those of us on 

dating sites. As if the little 

squares and coy introductions weren’t 

triggering enough—

Lucy my daughter wanted to have

me arrested. I had a kind 

of metallic drive. There was

the guy who barely spoke. 

He said “Nice” or “Yes” over

text and watched horse races

or track and field or 

professional golf 

on the Olympic channel 

  whenever I talked to him

by phone. Once, even, when we were 

on Zoom! Can you believe 

I thought in the beginning 

that the long pauses 

were a kind of Buddhist “mindfulness,” 

that I had a version

of his full attention? 

. . . . The Lothario who grew orchids 

and wrote long, beautiful

letters about catching horn worms on his

tomato plants at night 

with his ultraviolet flashlight 

(I found one this afternoon in 

blustery cool October, 

bold as it could be, 

fat and munching away—

in broad daylight) who told me, eventually, 

he had a drug habit

and a “girlfriend,” who cleaned his kitchen

every day late morning, 

and then his clock. Ron in 

Miami. Steve, actually geographically

accessible, who dropped me.

Bob, smooth-talking

Republican who said Covid 19

was no worse than the seasonal flu. 

Brad, twenty years younger 

than me, on his second marriage,

with four children, 

who love-bombed me for a year 

and then . . . 

I’m in my house alone. 

My children

            are grown, my husband

is gone, and I have allowed myself

            to stay in, like a witch

in a fairy tale, the thin layer 

            of snow outside hardening

on every surface into a sheet of sugar.

            And for once I’m not

out there trying to break it with

            an ax. For once I am not

running errands—or going to 

            the Y—in my flowered 

puffer coat. I’m keeping my magic

            indoors, the huge

book on Tarot I ordered on Amazon,

            the flaming woodstove,

and my plump calico slightly

redolent of shit and the 

thinner blue-eyed white and gray 

one who sheds 

long white hairs

on my black day and night

get-up. 

Outside it sparkled all day

and I stayed in. I was not 

afraid of myself. I didn’t mind 

“the silent compression 

of the ark,” my teiva,

which means both box 

and word.

*This poem is presented courtesy of GMR Online

About Dana Roeser

Dana Roeser’s fourth book, All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, won the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press and was published in September 2019. She is also the author of The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed, recipient of the Juniper Prize, as well as Beautiful Motion and In the Truth Room, both winners of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. Among her many awards and honors are the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and numerous residencies in the U.S. and abroad. She has read her work widely and taught in the MFA programs in poetry at Purdue, Butler, and Wichita State Universities. For more, see www.danaroeser.com.