Simon Says Baby

*

Touched my toes,

spun in the kitchen—

This unsteadied the flour canister,

my obedience left marks,

filled my lungs—

Cruel pillows, but I was still in.

*

He also said, laundry, shh, and

The coats go there.

My body moved:

Yes and now and what a good idea.

*

Not wanting to lose, I held still for the trick:

plain old prefer something.

*

Then he said, evangelize before submit.


*

I am tired of touching my toes.

My hamstrings are hard hurt concrete slabs.

My daughter was one command I was happy to perform.

Thirty-Minute Lunch Break

I guess it’s pretty standard—clocking out,
re-heating, driving through, starving.
I spend thirty seconds of each thirty minutes
tidying the break room—the other half is for a man.
I watch one, outside and riding in an orange cart,
spinning on wheels, moving dirt around. Bobcat
and a retaining wall, mid-foundation.
The glass door, leading out into the hot, is all that stands
between me and my silly twirling man
living inside a grown-up video game. The point system:
For good form, he gets tomato juice. For finishing the job, pineapple.
My heels snag on a folding chair, the phones
might be ringing off the hook,
and I can’t see him anymore.
Though I suspect, to see, all I have to do is stand up.

---------

Amanda Cobb Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand

The images in "No, It's Not a Bad Time" are varied--from biblical to food to baby dolls to attic wind chimes. How did you come to choose this varied landscape of images to act as metaphors and similes?

The biblical shows up in a lot of my poems; it would be hard to deny that growing up reading the Bible has influenced the way I write, though most of the time, passages and images show up under scrutiny. But in the case of this poem, I’ve chosen prayer at the beginning to show desperation. The seventy times seven reference is to forgive a speaker who is hard on herself. As for the other images (doll, paper whites, tomatoes, wind chimes, mud, etc.), they have a texture of the quotidian that contribute to both the frustrations of the speaker and the stuff that simply gets the poem written.

"She Thinks About Quitting" switches quickly between light thoughts like getting "toes done" or getting a trim and heavier thoughts about the direction of the narrator's life, which makes the poem seem very believable--and light, and heavy. How do you choose this careful, believable balance when crafting a poem like this one?

Maybe this poem is believable because I wrote it while in graduate school, teaching composition courses, plus working part time at a spa—and as a single mother to boot. It was all too much. Balance was a trick. Either I cared about getting my roots done or I cared about my child and my writing. And believe me, there were days that I believe I needed (yes, needed) a pedicure more than food. I had to write this poem to gain some perspective between the “light and heavy.”

"Simon Says Baby" works with form quite a bit--for example, it uses varied sentence structures and punctuation marks, stanza breaks, space between lines, and more than one speaker. Did you work with form in this poem because of the subject matter, or did you start at a different point? What was your process in writing this poem?

These syntactical and space choices weren’t really choices—I wrote what felt right, what felt like a game of Simon Says; that’s why there’s more than one speaker. One orchestrates the game and the other performs accordingly. That might be too simplistic, but the tension between a child’s game and a woman’s forced duty in life was interesting to me and everything just fell into place.