Happy Foot Sad Foot
by Ruth Madievsky
(published in Bat City Review, Issue 16)
This world is equally home to sleeping dogs
and intestinal parasites
eyebrow brushes and Congress
the Everglades and Supercuts and Russian delis
where shopkeepers plunge bare hands
into buckets of sardines
It belongs to the rotating sign outside
the Silver Lake foot clinic
that predicts what kind of day you’ll have
depending on whether Happy Foot
or Sad Foot flashes
as you drive by
To the smell of rubbing alcohol
To the erogenous zone behind the ear
It belongs to bats trapezoids hot glue guns asthma
the butcher’s freezer the piano teacher’s shoe
all our radioactive sites
our apple cores
our sex dust and strobe lights
Every hair you’ve pulled from your soup
belongs on this earth as much as you
Any superiority you feel toward horny toads
or iceberg lettuce
is as narcotic a delusion
as the belief that your voice in recordings
is not the voice in your mouth
This photo is from a Salon article; read it by clicking here.
This is one of those poems that I like immediately with the first 2 lines, then I fall in love with it as I get to know it better. Each re-reading makes me love it more. Yes! It is a poem that I wish I had written!
I do love list poems, and poetry written about everyday things--both are here in Madievsky's poem. But it's her framing of the list that really makes this poem go above and beyond.
"The world is equally home to" pulls the reader in, agreeably. Yes, we can all agree to this, even when we go from the lovable (sleeping dogs) to the very icky (intestinal parasites). We get very comfortable and then at the end the poem hits us with a stark--but very true--reminder: we are not superior. Not to "horny toads" or "iceberg lettuce" (her choice here of these 2 things is brilliant).
If any reader is kind of put off by being put in their place by this bit of honesty, the poet reels us back in with an experience we have all had, that of hearing our own voices and thinking, "that is NOT what I sound like," even though of course it is.
For me, this is a feel-good poem that is also realistic, and that is not easy to pull off.
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