the rain today brought the snails out for their snail-paced play.
they left snotty trails on the concrete of the back porch.
my son squatted by the open back door,
cooing over the slow-dancing snails, telling me,
look, dad, they’ve all found their shells.
the big ones have found big shells,
and the little ones have found little shells.
they all found the shells that fit them just right.
at the edge of the porch, by the wet grass, he saw an empty shell.
he picked it up, looking around for the snail it must have belonged to.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
tücher the prince and cinderella scoot
moving boy-footed and girl-slippered to set the coffee table for tea
fat-handed children giggly to spread the white sheet with tease and toys
the sheet doing for a tablecloth for children spilling onto the floor
their laughy bodies falling falling
stopped at mid-play by cinderella’s mother calling
‘step lightly, cinderella, step away’
leaving a slim glass slipper under the ghostly-sheeted coffee table
topped by cold dregs for sipping
stale scones for supping
cinderella slipping like mist from charmful tücher the prince
now of the -pality of one
boy-footed to the doorway moving
watching cinderella run
calling to the ashen girl vanishing cinderella! making fists unmaking fists
making fists again
fat hands rolled into scepter’s ends
prince tücher squints into the brightliness of a sunnish day
watching the girl-slippered girl slip away—
knobby-handed princeling, it’s time to clear the table
there will be another ball tonight
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“Fish pain is something different from our own pain. In the elaborate mirrored hall that is human consciousness, pain takes on existential dimensions. Because we know that death looms, and grieve for the loss of richly imagined futures, it’s tempting to imagine that our pain is the most profound of all suffering. But we would do well to remember that our perspective can make our pain easier to bear, if only by giving it an expiration date. When we pull a less cognitively blessed fish up from the pressured depths too quickly, and barometric trauma fills its bloodstream with tissue-burning acid, its on-deck thrashing might be a silent scream, born of the fish’s belief that it has entered a permanent state of extreme suffering.” – Ross Andersen, “What the Crow Knows”