Twenty Years Ago, There Was
No Such Thing as Thundersnow

My mother calls me on the phone to tell me she is terrified of the weather

and do I know, have I heard, about the atmospheric lake?

My parents are Southern Baptists, and she acts as though 

it might be some hellish lake of fire straight out of Revelation.  

Ten years ago, I eliminated MSG from all our food,

seeking some sort of sustenance-based purity,

but yesterday I discovered the hydrolyzed soy protein I buy from Sprout’s 

is basically MSG in another form.

I gave up synthetic food colors, those candy buttons

and cupcake roses made of red dye 40

until somebody told me that even in upscale restaurants

the guacamole’s artificially colored green.

My father explains to me about the recent heat dome

and how in the winter there will be bomb cyclones, thundersnow.

Unlike my mother, he finds it all amusing, the Weather Channel

and Wikipedia providing a mindless stream of infotainment.

Everybody knows hysteria was never real.

Everybody knows the womb cannot, does not, wander, 

helter-skelter, throughout the body, mauling organs, disrupting fluids,

like an angry pit bull unleashed on unsuspecting children.

Somehow, that doesn’t comfort me, not even after several Xanax, 

probably too many, though not enough to end it all.

I try to watch cat videos on YouTube, 

but they aren’t as funny when they don’t buffer.

My life is an endless series of ridiculous, unfunny problems.  

There are dozens of chemicals that mimic the effects of MSG.

We visit my partner’s parents’ house for Christmas, and he tells me

that for years his father sprayed the baseboards with illegal DDT.

The ingredient list on food packages is ever-changing.

I cannot fight off the latest strain of COVID,  

too weak to get off the sofa to look through the old-fashioned peephole.

The doorbell camera shuts off automatically the moment someone’s there. 

How is this a setting a programmer thought might be even remotely useful?

I say goddammit and my stomach cramps up again.

I have no failures, no foibles, and God knows no accidents.  

I grew up Southern Baptist, so everything’s a sin.

PayPal informs me I am required to verify my identity,

as if for the previous fifteen years, I might have been someone else.

I recently won a $50 prize for a poem from a Canadian publication,

the foreign currency exchange apparently marking me as suspicious.

They are freezing my account, holding my $50 hostage, 

and when the software refuses to recognize my face, the same face upon my license,

I decide it isn’t a prize at all, just another minor source of rage.

My partner urges me to try again.

Hold the camera this way. Tilt it closer. Try to smile like in your photo.

My lips are crooked, my smile sardonic, like a gargoyle,

like something only halfway human. Are you sure I have to smile?

Isn’t it supposed to recognize me with any expression?  From any angle?