Self-Portrait with Return Address Labels
Whose world is this of beehives and butterflies?
Tulips and zinnias, kites and starfish,
lighthouses, a rainbow’s thigh
through a cloud, beach scenes, bald-eagle heads—
whose world is this
of silver stars on a blue field,
tiny trees with pink apples, or Mount Rushmore
with the U.S. flag for a sky?
It’s mine: Every adhesive label,
the size of the smallest Band-Aid,
gives three lines to my name and address
alongside a portal, one-half-inch square,
into a world of overwhelming cheerfulness,
colorful, consistent, no skulls and crossbones, no faces of eels,
no burnt pans, or overfilled sinks,
sunburn or oil spills – and their ribbon bits,
yellow or pink, are proxies for cheer
regarding military actions and mammograms.
In inevitable August they arrive,
sent in the envelope too thick to tear,
the Horn of Plenty, repeated two hundred times,
in November, the boxed holiday gifts, and the snowflakes
of four designs, and snowmen wearing stocking caps.
In this world rough neighborhoods
and hidden meanings do not exist,
world without failure or death,
managed by angels; not one demon or misprint
in forty sheets of address labels.
But they sent me too those fantasy geese
in poke-bonnets, ribbons knotted on their necks,
whom only I, the born killjoy,
see as the cultural symbol
of overconsumption and overfeeding.
I stick those on the bills I don’t like paying.
They are the useful gifts
of the Disabled and Paralyzed American Veterans,
whose only marketable possession is my name.
Two hundred repetitions of it,
meditated by an inkjet,
tempt me to give to their campaign;
that, and their kind and modest letter, not about my,
but their, contribution, and a pre-paid envelope
wasted if I don’t reply.
I can’t throw it away
without a little crisis.
Flap of cotton or fine black wool
spun to a sheen, magenta and yellow
cabbage-roses printed on phantasmagorical
greenery, or an aerial map of operatic
paisley, colors bilious, choleric, sanguine;
folded, two corners tied beneath the chin,
instantly estranges and ages,
says, when the foreign face turns away, “I show you
the garden you believe it is impossible I am.”
Catherine Rankovic’s poems and essays have been published in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, River Styx, Natural Bridge, MARGIE, Boulevard, Umbrella and other journals. She earned an M.A. in literature from Syracuse University and an M.F.A. in poetry writing from Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis (Penultimate Press, 2010), a book of in-depth interviews with 13 St. Louis writers, and also the books Island Universe: Essays and Entertainments (2007), and Fierce Consent and Other Poems (2005).
