American Atavistic by David Booth
On my way out of town one night I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker who has turned out to be a serial killer. I tell him in no uncertain terms that I am far more than a brand manager. I have my wife and kids to consider. I have a soul wherein winged things rise like heat through an aesthetic seeing God in the wind in the trees! If I drive my friends a little crazy with an exaggerated dark side, am I not a true patriot? Is not my most successful brand for a new style of hot-dogging? Do I not read my passenger right as a man starved for attention? He tells me his name is clearly a pseudonym. I nod my head in agreement. He tells his victims what is going to happen to them. “Contrary to popular demand,” he says, “my mother was the confrontational one and Father with his flat affect indescribable.” It’s kind of funny. Why not forgive them? When he says, “My teachers were sleeping logs who couldn’t let sleeping logs lie,” not only does no one doubt him for a second but the idea has been rolling around in their heads for centuries. What they have a harder time swallowing is their own dumb knife. Small talk falters, taunting relentless. They becomes we when suddenly we pound the wheel and throw our heads back in laughter as if to say in our own inimitable way what could be so funny? We press cold steel against our Adam’s apples. We rip our eyes out before anyone applies any real pressure. We take ourselves apart limb by limb in the darkness and in the morning pull ourselves together again unaware all day long of our own majesty. Who can say to whom such fantasies belong or from whence such emotions are far flung when one daydreams of meeting force with force and every third time coming out victorious?
David Booth's Bio:
David Booth is a high school humanities teacher and a poet. He lives with his wife Ingrid Hawkinson in San Francisco, California. Over the past twenty years, such outfits as Chicago Quarterly Review, Washington Square, M.I.T. Press, and Missouri Review have published his creative and academic writing. His blog is sacredpedestrians.com. Too Bright to See (Simi Press, 2021) is his debut collection of poems.
David Booth is a high school humanities teacher and a poet. He lives with his wife Ingrid Hawkinson in San Francisco, California. Over the past twenty years, such outfits as Chicago Quarterly Review, Washington Square, M.I.T. Press, and Missouri Review have published his creative and academic writing. His blog is sacredpedestrians.com. Too Bright to See (Simi Press, 2021) is his debut collection of poems.
