In the morning I ate a banana
like a young ape
and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”

In the afternoon I opened the mail
with a short kitchen knife,
and when dusk began to fall

I took off my clothes,
put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”
and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.

I closed my eyes and thought
about the alphabet,
the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten

to become literature.
If the British call z zed,
I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead?

And why does z, which looks like
the fastest letter, come at the very end?
unless they are all moving east

when we are facing north in our chairs.
It was then that I heard
a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark,

and the claw-footed bathtub
took one step forward,
or was it backward

I had to ask
as I turned
to reach for a faraway towel.

 = Karen Marek