Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert
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THE ONE ABOUT COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY
A warrior walks into a bar. Sits down next to a member of the fallen gentry. The warrior appreciates subtlety, insofar as it plays into power dynamics. Personal service is the warrior’s specialty; satisfaction is almost guaranteed. In life, nothing is guaranteed; there is no escaping life, not satisfactorily. That loneliness can feel so distracting is the real surprise. The warrior comes out and says so. “Love is like a mountain: hard to climb, but once you get to the top the view is beautiful,” his barmate replies. The gentry fell for a reason, the warrior thinks.
THE ONE ABOUT THE ELEPHANT
An elephant goes to the doctor. Attempting to muster the will to live. Everything the doctor offers the elephant, the elephant wants less of. He is the master of his own destiny, he keeps saying. The doctor thinks all elephants look the same. A wall chart delineates the history of domestication. The elephant believes it can evolve in its own lifetime. Also that money can make you feel better, like aspirin. He can't very well be against animal testing; sometimes animals need the money.
THE ONE ABOUT MAGICAL THINKING
A magician walks into a bar. She’s been in the ocean and has saltwater hair. Maybe she's not a magician but a mermaid, or maybe this is one of his tricks. The night before, the universe crossed its half-way point. He/she's in a shirt that says I VOTED FOR NADIR. The nostalgia now is worth whatever it cost then. We remember the titans, if not what they did.
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Elisa Gabbert is the author of The Self Unstable (Black Ocean) and The French Exit (Birds LLC). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, the PEN Poetry Series, Phoebe, and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (ed. Andrew Ridker).
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her latest book is the novel in poems Robinson Alone (Gold Wake, 2012) and her debut novel O, Democracy! is forthcoming from Fifth Star Press in April 2014. She lives in Chicago. Her latest chapbook with Elisa Gabbert is The Kind of Beauty that has Nowhere to Go (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).