THE ACADEMY OF CHEER
The Academy of Cheer forbids Talking Heads, Visions of Joanna, Chopin’s Ballade or any dwelling on the levels of infinity. Cheer-Masters order me to be grateful for 10 things, mercifully a finite number. I raise 10 still-mobile fingers, I wiggle a large opposable thumb. But the Cheer-Masters frown, my chipped nails offend. During daily silence when heads rest on wooden desks, I make a single forbidden clap, it echoes down corridors. I am forced to watch reruns of Call the Midwife, unsmiling years pass. My escape involves smoke, not fire. I settle elsewhere, there is unlimited chill, I iron clothes to feel heat. There are infinite points between thumb and index finger, hand and door, door and sky: cheer rests on one level, a flying saucer in War of the Worlds, real until someone turns the lights on.
Carla Sarett is a poet and fiction writer based in S.F. Her first poetry collection, She Has Visions, is out this fall from Main Street Rag Press. Recent work appears in Pithead Chapel, Rock Paper Poem, Neologism and MONO.
