Frogs Riding on Squirrels

Frogs Riding on Squirrels

Let me start you off with a piece of light verse, 
an amuse-bouche before the foie gras of my gloom. 
I will show you pictures of bewildered cats
stuck in boxes and celebrity wardrobe malfunctions.
How about the video of my daughter shouting 
“No Mitt Womney,” from the 2012 election?
She’s cute, and you will laugh, and then
inevitably I will mention that I was manic
and heavily medicated that election night,
that I watched all the ads for the candidates
that year in the waiting room of the ECT clinic
at Beth Israel Deaconess. I had a friend who 
killed himself with levity, with a party-sized tank 
of helium gas. I was brought low by lightness.
Watch how my mind bends always backwards 
toward bitterness. I will take pliers in both hands 
and twist myself back again: A day we drank champagne 
in a park, next to a playground, shooting the cork 
high in the air. The night we dropped 
acid and I made meringues. Alcohol-fueled Austin, 
all rooftop bars and breakfast tacos. A joint 
and then pickled beets in a restaurant in Brooklyn.
No, imagine I have written a limerick instead. Imagine 
people doing funny dances on 80s television shows,
jazz hands, dogs driving tractors, pigeons pooping on heads.
Don’t look at me here, dragging ass around living,
with my multitude of prescriptions and my aptitude for grim. 
Let this be about guns shooting rainbows.
Let this be about frogs riding on squirrels.

-- Amy Isikoff Newell

References to memes below. First drafted in 2014, predominantly about events that, if they took place at all, maybe took place in 2011-2012. From my forthcoming chapbook Death By Asphyxiation, to be published when I get the fuck around to it.

A still from Kesha’s 2011 video “Blow”

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