PROSE POETRY
RANNEY CAMPBELL
RANNEY CAMPBELL
JUST LEISURE ENOUGH
Was reading another one of those poems that triggers this in me, this filthy resentment I want to rid myself of--against those who have money and time enough (money=time) to sit and have breakfast at a patio table near the beach, eating croissants and thinking about how deep a Pacific trench is or how the universe is expanding and the concept of how much a trillion dollars might be, because money equals enough space in the mind to ponder things other than how you will pay the rent next month when the money runs out since you had to leave the warehouse job at Amazon because of the injury you incurred at work that they say is not work related and how you can’t afford the cigarettes you use to try to soothe, but then feel guilty about, as if the guilt of poverty and all that it implies, or rather, is evidence of, about you is not enough, and I wish the indignation would fly away into the sky like Bezos, left over from when I discovered, or rather, was misinformed, that because my parents had nothing but a shack in a bad neighborhood and a couple of old cars that I never could go to college from my eighth grade guidance counselor who took 20 minutes before he could beat me down, telling me about how there were different types of people in the world, and who had how much and who didn’t have any, that I found to be irrelevant to what I was asking--what are the best schools of journalism in the nation and do I have to take biology in high school to get into them--my only two questions that I kept reasserting over and over after dutifully waiting for him to complete, like a good girl, which I was, since I had learned from birth that my mother did not love me and I would do anything I could for almost the rest of my life to try to be good, good enough that she would, when I wasn’t defiantly going in entirely the other direction, but he didn’t look up my grades to see all those As nor ask if I was breaking the high school track record for the high jump in my first year of middle school or the state record for the 50-yard dash the year after that in gym classes to see how high I would jump or how fast I would run to get out of my neighborhood and the life that came with it since you couldn’t get in a rocket ship from there or even sit at a patio table smelling salted air but maybe take orders from those who could, if you managed to fake middle-class good enough to get hired since otherwise you might make the customers feel uncomfortable while they were trying to enjoy sumptuousness and discuss philosophical right-brained subjects, and count up the dollars they left on the table and tell yourself you should be grateful for what you have--so I could manage stillness enough to gaze up and conjecture loftiness and deactivate the neural pathways cast deep and olden as the ocean that cause one’s mind to even come up with the thoughts to begrudge a poem of such loveliness, but perhaps I can write my way out of this if I follow my bliss...as they profess.
Ranney Campbell earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri at St. Louis and her creative work has been published by or is forthcoming in Shark Reef, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem and others. Her chapbook, “Pimp,” is published by Arroyo Seco Press.