12

The Motion Sickness Of Colanders
or
Public Transportation As A Spiritual Experience



A de-motorcycled braid-beard
with grocery bag guts putrefies in situ.
Baseball caps in back seats insist
they are bookmarks to girls with dictionary lips.
Irena, clammy and chitinous in the midseat,
knows that cancerous moles are making love
in the jelly of her third chin, but the bus
won’t lower at her stop for twenty-five more years.

The driver claims Bodhicitta:
“After eighteen years of driving for TriMet,
I’ve realized that riding a bus is a spiritual experience.
It takes a long time to get where you’re going
with many unplanned stops along the way,
you meet people you’d never expect,
and someone else has control over the wheel.”
More momentously, a mother gelatinously croons,
sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down…

Passengers are colanders.
Passengers are portable lacunae.
Passengers are black hole bundt cakes.
Passengers are button holed, doughnut holed, assholed.
Passengers are little succulent chattering sponges with sockets.
Passengers are urethral, sunspotted, goey dancing uteri propped on twiggy cornstalks.
I could go on.

It’s amazing that we don’t all blend Monet-like
into an oily pimpled lint meat of quick packed strangers
smelling of polyester smoke chocolate smoothies
singing like vomit sloshing in a tin can.
Come on, human holes like to touch.
We’ll all swisscheese together someday anyway
especially since this bus is packed and we don’t control the momentum.



By Tanya Collings

In order to confuse her friends and family, Tanya enjoys skinning roadkill while wearing a polka dot dress. Her life goal is to be eaten alive by mountain lions in the Escalante wilderness by age seventy-nine.