Wac-A-Mole Realism™
Matthea Harvey
At the carnival, Robo-Boy sees only things he recognizes. The Ferris Wheel is an overgrown version of his own bells and whistle eyes. His Flashers, his mother calls them. The Tilt-A-Whirl is the angle his head tilts when the Flirt Program goes into effect, usually in the vicinity of a Cindy or a Carrie, though once he found himself tilting at the school librarian which caused him to wheel in reverse into the Civil War section knocking over a cart of books that were waiting to be shelved under B. There’s a dangerously low stratosphere of pink cotton-candy clouds being carried around by the children. If Robo-Boy goes near them, the alarms will go off. It’s the kind of sticky that would cause joint-lock for sure. In a darker, safer corner Robo-Boy finds the Whack-A-Mole game. He pays a dollar and starts whacking the plastic moles on their heads each time they pop up from the much-dented log. He wins bear after bear. It’s only when he's lugging them home, the largest one skidding face-down along the sidewalk getting dirt on its white nose and light blue belly, that he remembers the program: Wac-A-Mole Realism™—the disc on the installer’s desk. Suddenly it all fits together: the way a deliciously strange thought will start wafting out of his unconscious—and then WHAM, it disappears.
I chose this poem today because of its pugilist title. I have a few moles I'd like to wac, but waccing begets waccing and so on and so on until the whole of existence becomes biblical or Shakespearean, in the sense that by the end everybody is dead or bloody. In reality you can only wac so many moles until you yourself get wacced.
In any case, my current mood led me to Matthea Harvey, a new voice, for me at least. Her prose poems read like micro fiction. If you are interested in reading more of her work, here's the link.
fyi: I always thought wac was spelled whack.
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