Shelby Handler is a Denver-born human who enjoys writing poems and short fiction. She writes both for on the page and the stage. Shelby has performed her poetry at the Chicago Theatre, the Mercury Café, one dive bar, too many high school classrooms to count, many living rooms, numerous coffee houses, the Seattle Art Museum and at least ten bedrooms that were not my own. Currently, she is concentrating in Creative Writing and Women Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Three Poems (March 20, 2011. Issue 26. The SLAM & FLASH Issue!)

I Don’t Know Anything About Egypt

February 8th, 2011, Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt:
The square is on fire
with screaming.
The crowds can feel the rest of the country
swelling
around them.
A photo of the protest
is taken from a helicopter.
Tahrir Square
on fire with motion
and mouths
and bright lights,
a blazing
resistance.

The lens amputates
the scene from its action
and commits it to film.
The photographer
knows he has captured
reality and packaged it in
a frame that Westerners can digest.
There is privilege in deciding
what that frame is,
there is privilege in watching
without dipping your hands in the blood.

24 hours later,
February 9th, 2011, Seattle, WA:
A student sees the photo on CNN,
it is silent and blazing.
She cannot feel the swell of it all.
There is no heat left in the image.
It has been emptied out and sold
to her eyes.
She consumes
and feels guilty
and the moment is plucked
from the struggle
and swallowed by sympathy.
The photo accuses everyone and no one.
She thinks,
“I am so small.
What can my small hands do?”

15 days earlier,
January 25, 2011, Cairo:
The streets of Cairo
are writhing,
there is a dam breaking across Egypt,
reporters say.
Reporters know no nothing of water.
Reporters know no nothing of drowning.

The country is a fist
unfolding,
and a bomb detonating continually
and simultaneously across Egypt.
People call Mubarak in the streets,
they call for blood.
Cairo smokes
and sparks,
screeching firework in on itself.

Two hours later,
January 25, 2011, Seattle:
I am too afraid of fire
to light a match.
I am too afraid to touch the trigger of a gun,
or admit the violence of my by standing.
I am both innocent
and infinitely guilty.
My scars
just wash off
and yet,
guilt isn’t so easy to remove from ones’ skin.
It is the smoke of cigarettes I never lit,
caught in my hair
and on my hands.

Something is being done in my name
each time the camera clicks.
It is a wonder that I can bear the thought of
a camera’s trigger.
I can point and shoot,
but I would never point and shoot.
People thought cameras stole souls once,
you know?
What makes my weapon any different?

Three days later,
January 28, 2011, Washington, D.C.:
President Obama hangs up the phone,
after speaking to Mubarak
for thirty minutes.

Then, he addresses the American people,
calls for Egypt to allow the Internet again,
calls for Mubarak to lead the country by consent,
not coercion.
He calls for the violence to end.

Six hours later,
January 28, 2011, Cairo, Egypt:
A young man,
sitting on another man’s shoulders,
amidst the pulsing throng of protesters,
raises his palms to the sky and screams.
Behind him, a photojournalist pulls a trigger
and evaporates the image into permanence.

The crowds are a collective heart throbbing,
swarms of humans
and their blog posts
and twitter updates
and Facebook images
updating and traveling across the world,
at every moment.

Six days later,
February 3rd, 2011, Cairo:
Mubarak tells Christiane Amanpour, of ABC News,
that he cannot step down
or there will be chaos.
His country is fragile, he says.
The presidential palace is pristine
around him.
He is a man in a glass house.
Eight miles away,
protestors are throwing stones.
Mubarak tells Amanpour that he is strong,
that he will die on Egyptian soil.
The men and women in Tahrir Square
beg to prove him right.
They threaten to behead any journalists
found in the streets.

Two days later,
February 5th, 2011, Seattle:
Videos of the protest
circulate the Internet.
The men around Mubarak,
even his own son,
begin to collapse around him.

The young student is still alive and unscathed,
and fashionably informed
on the issue.
She imagines an alleyway in Cairo:
a young boy launching a stone
straight into a window,
the sound of shattered glass explodes,
and the boy runs.

Four days earlier,
February 1st, 2011, Cairo:
The open mouths of women
in the streets
are riots all their own.
Their hands,
leaping forth from burqas
explode over the crowds.

A young girl in a pink skirt
walks on top of an army tank
in Tahrir Square.
Beside her,
a solider points
at the camera capturing the moment.
The little girl does not
look up.

Eighteen yards away,
a woman kisses the face of a riot police officer.
A camera,
zoomed close to their two faces,
steals the instant immediately.

Ten days later,
February 11th, 2011, Cairo:
The streets
yell that Egypt is Free.
From above, a camera captures
the flags swinging
and hordes of people,
filling the roads,
honking car horns
and dancing amongst the broken glass.
Egypt is free, they say.
Egypt has spoken, President Obama says.

Nine days later,
February 20th, 2011, Cairo:
A young man names his newborn daughter
“Facebook”,
in honor of its role in the revolution.
The infant screams,
its body pristine and bloody,
like the country around her.

The streets are emptier now.
Traffic runs normally in Tahrir Square,
as protestors pick up stones
that were thrown across it.

Four hours earlier,
February 20th, 2011, Seattle, WA:
I see a photo of two men,
hunched over piles of rocks
as they scoop them into black garbage bags.
My small hands cannot
imagine the weight
of those stones.

The Exterminator

When I was eight years old,
our kitchen was infested by ladybugs.
The crimson beetles nested in our teacups
and the corners of our cupboards.
They looked like a colony of cherry tomatoes
with spots.

Mother shrieked
at the quivering mass of wings.
She has always feared the threat
of flight.

I was fascinated,
eager to lift up a cup
covered entirely in ladybugs.
I wondered if they’d fly away with it.

When Mother wasn’t looking,
I scooped up a pile of the bugs
with both hands.
There were heavy in my palms,
a trembling pile of rubies

Every animal in our house
was required to be flightless
and polite:
skittish cat,
quiet Father,
well manicured Mother
and me,
a porcelain son.
And these crops of swelling reds
were neither
polite nor flightless.

We walked through the infected house,
the ladybugs swarmed
a light bulb in the hall.
For that moment,
the pulsing of collective flutter
looked like a beating heart,
palpitations
in scarlet.

I heisted a few of the bugs,
saving them from certain death
by broom or shoe.
I kept them in a mason jar
on my windowsill
as quiet stirring companions.

Since then,
I have loved the hushed quiet of insects.
The hiss of a cockroach,
the hum of a wasp,
the flicker of fruit flies,
even the slink of larvae
reverberates inside me.

Other people call them pests.
And curse them,
armed with swatters and sprays.
Sure, that’s my business,
I make my living on your disgust.
But I still don’t understand
how you can fear something so similar to yourself.
Maybe that’s what scares you.

Have you ever felt so small you could hide in a bed frame?
Do you want your own hive some days?
Do you ever want to be tiny
and poisonous
with enough legs to run away faster?
I wish I was invisible but still alive,
burrowing in skin with the grace of a dust mite.

But,
I’m just human:
bulky and responsible.
If I ate my mate right after we made love,
people would probably get suspicious.
It is such a bother to be so big
and judgmental.

So what part of your self are you trying to kill when you call me?
Are you,
like me,
tired of being so important
and so visible?

Most people say they call the Exterminator
because they are allergic,
or clean freaks
or it’s just what you do when you get bugs.

And I do this job,
not because I want to kill them,
not because I don’t like to see people scared,
and not out of circumstance.
I chose this
because I know I’m one of the few people
honest enough
or brave enough
or lonely enough
to get so close.

Human Instrument

It’s times like this I wish I played guitar.
I could really use some background noise,
right about now.
Or it could serve as a hollow wooden shield,
something that sounds bigger and louder and fuller
than my scrap of a mouth.
Or at least,
something to hold onto,
something to keep me company up here.

I am no guitar,
no music man,
there are no pianos stashed in my throat
or back pocket.
My tongue fumbles its own chord progression
upon the strings of my voice box.
If only I could swallow a cello
and cough up something more solid
than a few words.

I try to disguise myself as a song.
I curl my lips outwards,
hoping they are mistaken for the mouth of a trombone.
I breathe deep into my chest,
my lungs,
thirsty drums
and my belly,
the fat curve of a stand up bass.
My grin-hard crooked teeth,
a keyboard.
Each finger, a drumstick,
every time I knock them to hips,
a symphony.
My bones,
a broken xylophone,
tied together with spit and whistle.
Ragtag jazz band
sits in the pit
of my stomach.
When it gurgles,
Beethoven turns in his grave
and an eighth grade girl gets her first slow dance.
It is close, sticky close
and the chaperones don’t notice,
and she reels,
poised and humming,
like a locust
in the arms of a boy two inches shorter than her.
And their tonsils
bang against each other,
glorious wind chimes.

There is something to be said for the buzzing between lovers,
a baritone beehive woven between the thick of lips.
Reverberation:
hollow and sacred,
as it scrapes their throats.

I have heard the orchestra of your breathing while you slept:
brass sputtering,
teeth thrown into a saxophone.
We wake,
and the first words you speak in the morning
are all harp
and honey,
moist mumbling.

I think I may be a banjo,
a silly instrument
that pours jagged joy.
Maybe that
and a dash of clumsy ukulele,
like a young boy teaching himself
and breaking a string.
Upon hearing the snap,
he is a pint size Jimi Hendrix,
a holy little heartbreaker rock star
and hasn’t even left his bedroom.

Laughter is a mandolin,
rising like the dust bare feet kick up
dancing to bluegrass.
Like steel strings and hands melting together,
like the ring of my father’s adolescence
and the pluck of tradition,
it echoes.

My heart,
a captive flute,
its ventricles
opening and closing to hit the correct notes,
the float of bloody crescendo pulsing under breastbone.
I am DIY choir,
at-home gospel,
a cathedral of sinew
and tendon.
I grew my own acoustics,
motherfucker.

I am an instrument,
one called a human.
My face,
the smooth flat of a drum,
lips, leather.
Arms, the snaked metal around trumpet.
Legs combined, the thick trunk of a cello.
And toes,
the scattered jingles of a broken tambourine.
But when I walk away,
you will have to listen close
to hear them.