Poem By My Cousin, Steve

“On waking at 4 a.m. to the floor shaking, and going downstairs to find Mrs. Robinson, twelve hours on the lam from her hamster cage, jammed in the smoking furnace” by Steve Norman


Her name was never so ripe
for parody, we hum the bars
God bless you please
and laugh a little, the furnace switch
now flipped to off, the floor above us
no longer a fault line.
We close the door to her aluminum
tomb, deciding to leave it all
for the morning, and upstairs we collapse
back onto our beds
with closure.

I lay and think for a moment
how I don’t care that she’s dead – she’s
someone else’s
eight-dollar emotional investment –
and yet I recall
the secret joy, the thrill
expanding inside me like helium
each second after I discovered her cage
empty, her door
open,
hanging awkwardly from its hinges,
a challenge to us and the world to create
something better, stronger,
less conquerable.
To think it all only came to this
waste.

Though, a week later
when the Minnegasco man hands
us a hundred-dollar furnace bill
I’ll understand the true hell blaze of glory
she went out in, and I’ll swear I hear
her laughing a high-pitched
nasally hamster laugh as I write out the check.