Jeni De La O: Remember This

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

Do you get nervous on planes?

or in traffic? I do; waiting for an inevitable big cliff moment:
the car ahead of me exploding, or a plane falling out of the sky; me:
a pool cue struck and hurling towards a headline.

Sometimes this feeling is ripe and low, a sweating summer fruit I must
pluck and bite, and hope not to survive because imagine all the tellings
and retellings! The obnoxious way I’d slip into the story’s rhythm,
landing line after line long after all the juice has been sucked out; people

nodding, no longer where we were but where I’ve placed us:
rushing them through the quick tour between bites at a dinner party--
here’s where you cry
here’s where you laugh
here’s where I break the fourth wall—
hoping they’ll be too dizzied by the speed and pitch of my voice,
too flustered by the sheer volume of all that crashing, to comment on
the placement of my jokes and why I chose things the way I chose them.

I’d probably close my eyes a lot while telling it, or worse:
open them extra wide and stare at the roof, incredulous. (Praying,
really, that I miss all the exchanged glances which mean,
when translated: remember this, I want to talk about it on the drive home.)

Thankfully, before I can imagine that conversation my exit appears in the snow or
in the rain or on a perfectly clear day—the danger doesn’t have to be real—
and I am home, again and again, waiting: for a missile to land or the furnace to explode
and send me flying.

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Jeni De La O is an Afro-Cuban poet and storyteller living in Detroit. She is the author of Lady Parts (Grey Borders Books, 2019). Her work has appeared in Obsidian, the Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, Tinderbox, Columbia Journal, Glass Poetry, Rattle, and others. Jeni edits poetry for Kissing Dynamite Poetry and organizes Poems in the Park, an acoustic reading series based in Detroit.