A poem by Muriel Mackie, a junior Marketing Major
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When Suzy was a chitlin,
There were bugs in the Glue Lagoon.
Stuck, soon-to-be vitlin’s--
Slurp those suckers with tin-can spoons.
Jewels on grass did glimmer,
Glass and rusty shocks.
Barefoot on gasoline shimmer,
Magpie flesh makes new pierced socks.
Where the Glue Lagoon did bloom,
Volleys of frenzied, frantic swoons,
From those pinched and poisoned lovers,
Did swing sweet chariots towards glittered alter,
And slide skinny hands, white as pus,
Through porous reedy weeds,
Wailing lovely laments to each other,
Bloodshot eyes brimming with simpering greed.
And in the Glue Lagoon Suze found
Another kind of kitchen sink.
Flip-side rodents spinning lazy,
On top of filmy, greasy drink.
There were flowers sopping yellow,
Dripping waxy, earthen spit.
There were possums with maggot eyes,
Eaten into swarming slits.
There were limping, burbl’ing frogs,
Lumping, pustulating boils
Coating thick skin slick with oil--
Dead and dying in heady bog.
(Suzy was a child when the Glue Lagoon
Was pulsing. Suzy was a little girl when
The Glue Lagoon was squirming. Suzy was
A tiny thing when the Glue Lagoon was
Sweating. Suzy doesn’t spend a single
Day regretting.)
In the hollow of a tree,
Wrens were decomposing.
In their gamey, brittle beaks,
Worms were stuffed plump rosy.
Plastic bags did snag and snare
Bramble branches, algae bouquets,
Rotting slowly, unused, spare:
The Glue Lagoon’s tawdry topee.
As toes slush in the slippery sludge,
Stinking, stinging, saturated flood,
Crunching slick the shells and bones
Of a thousand miniature abodes
Of things once fleshy and alive,
Things that squirmed and wormed and writhed,
Around broke bottles and shaved strings,
Around crusted, busted, metal shavings,
Past a thousand screaming gnats,
Spinning hard and loud and fast,
Around the gloppy, floppy goop,
That birthed the Glue’s sticky soup,
Inside where fish did backflips slow,
And whistled while they sunk below,
Eyes a glassy, gaseous green,
Matching the entire scene.
Suzy sweat and smelled the air,
Felt whining flies buzz frizzy
Through garden-dirty hair,
Felt her lungs sniff dizzy
When strong stench hit her head--
Hazy, steaming jungle,
Breathing in and out again.
The Glue Lagoon’s signature
Stagnant squeeze,
Baking in the chemical breeze,
Acidic condensation
Rooting out all oxygen
From that wetted smog,
Hard to breathe, great to slog,
Gorged wide on porous, heavy air,
Burled tight inside free pockets there,
Gleaming a yellow fissure glow,
Throughout the sky and far below.
Suzy smiled, stepped in the water,
Cut her foot on a broken bottle.
Suzy walked a little further,
Thighs in the bog.
Waded in a smidgen closer,
Eyes in the bog.
Toe tapped some stuck dead thing.
Suzy smiled with coming spring.
Sunk low and deep, concrete slabs did
Scratch her feet.
Drowned hands twist in tattered guts
From long-dead deer with
Plastic glut.
Suzy slipped into the blood,
Into the glitz, into the mud.
Suzy found another grudge,
Peaceful in the morning sludge.
Deep inside the Glue Lagoon,
Pulses red and oozing tomb.
Deep inside the Glue Lagoon,
Thumps the red and woozy womb.
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