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Spring is the season for looking into a terrible mirror. 
In the spring, I always wake up to myself and find my face unfortunately skewed. This year, we're all waking up from a deeper and more disgruntling hibernation than usual. That's why I like this week's poem. It's an owning up to grimy disaster, a claiming of mess. "If there's pee on the seat it's my pee."

Diane Seuss's poems catch me quickly, make me laugh. In this case, the rapid internal rhyme of the first few lines (pee, seat, pee, battery, canary, bury) launches you into the poem's tumbling rhythm, its characterization of the speaker as God and God as not doing so hot. Watch for how the poem returns, at the end, to the syntax it began with ("battery's dead I killed it, canary at the bottom / of the cage I bury it"). The weight of the sentence, its subject and verb, fall in its final clause, after all the accumulated action, laying claim, taking ownership. "I use it."  

Song in my heart
By Diane Seuss

If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee,
battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottom
of the cage I bury it, like God tromping the sky
in his undershirt carrying his brass spittoon,
raging and sobbing in his Hush Puppy house
slippers with the backs broke down, no Mrs.
God to make him reasonable as he gets out
the straight razor to slice the hair off his face,
using the Black Sea as a mirror when everyone
knows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror,
like God is a terrible simile for me but like
God with his mirror, I use it.

This poem was originally published in POETRY Magazine (December 2009). To tromp = to walk heavily, trudge, tread, stamp on. So exactly what you thought it meant from its sound before you Googled just to check. 

The Postscript

1. Band practice in very small, personal-pizza-sized tents. 
2. A very beautiful comic on gender and transition (click arrows to move through slides). 
3. A shout-out to Sailor Moon as formative to my personality.
4. The thrilling Mugler Spring/Summer 2021 show.
5. The tale of an 8 year-old who successfully conned her way out of Zoom school. 
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Every Friday, I'll send you one good poem by someone who isn't me + commentary.
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Sonia Feldman · 2529 Detroit Ave · Cleveland, OH 44113 · USA

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