SHOPPING FOR A BLENDER

That day, I died of exposure, stuck in the tar
of the blacktop outside the department store
pinned in place by the stake of your criticisms,
scorched in shame as people passed, glancing.

When you were a boy in grade school
you took a magnifying glass on the playground.
Your friends cheered as you made the ants squirm
and burned caterpillars before they grew wings.

--Karen Crone, 1999

Posted in reply to OSI: Spectacle, placed here on the VTH in gratitude for such a place and for its loving manager, who sees our stories as sacred, and the art of telling them as spiritual--at times even healing. Thanks, Beth!

What a spectacle.  The tar pit...I had a yellowjacket nest under my house last summer. The entrance was a small slit to the right of my backdoor. I hadn't noticed where they were going--but after my friend Krayna's mini-dach got stung by the jackets, I went to Home Depot and got some kind of powerful yellow foam that seals up cracks and stuff, and blasted it all around the door frame on the bottom.  The yellow jackets that were outside, now I noticed...would as the light started to fade, come to a glide to go in THEIR door.. and couldn't get to their family.  They would try for hours, and then go off somewhere, I'm sure to die from exposure and lack of wasp-love. I imagined the wasps inside dying slowly from despair and lack of food and fright and anger.  I have left the ugly yellow foam around the door this summer to remind me to be more aware.  I'm sure, if I'd come across the fact that they wasps were nesting there, I could have done something less drastic. 

Andy has mice in his pantry.  I'm taking one of those sonic things over so he won't have to kill them.

I'm trying to stay out of the tarpits.