Hysterical

A happy summer’s day:
cut-offs and gladiator sandals.
Hungry lions, zero.
Heads on pikes, none.
Every person on earth,
regardless of tongue,
appears to be simultaneously laughing
while you go to the gym,
stay for a week on the elliptical.
It is your language.
At times you sit or lie still—
sleep, kombucha, vampires on TV.
But always you come back
to your gym and the elliptical.
This is not an apology,
but will someone tell you they’re sorry?
You wouldn’t ask but like a hen
that never roosts,
because you are a clucky,
cacophonous bird, too full
of spite and eggshells
to sit and brood.
Besides, there is the perpetual laughter.
Even when the joke is no longer funny.
Even when there isn’t a joke.

*

Cindy King is the author of a book-length poetry collection, Zoonotic (2022), and two poetry chapbooks, Easy Street (2021) and Lesser Birds of Paradise (2022). Her latest poetry manuscript won the C&R Poetry Book Award and will be published in 2024. Her chapbook, OhioChic, will be released by Galileo Press in 2024.

Cindy’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, Callaloo, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, American Literary Review, Gettysburg Review, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She recently served as a featured Festival Poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She has also received fellowships and scholarships from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center, Colgate University, and other organizations.

Cindy was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. She currently lives in Utah, where she is an associate professor of creative writing at Utah Tech University and editor of The Southern Quill and Route 7 Review. She also serves as an editorial assistant for both Seneca Review and TriQuarterly.