“Ambrosia” and “Losing It” by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

 "Ambrosia"

O Administrivia, most powerful, now is your time.

Fill this empty space with casket choices and telephone calls, 

probate courts and housecleaning. Tell us what to do 

with the twelve Cool-Whip tubs of frozen chili,

the nineteen pairs of torn nylons, and the fifty-two

unopened boxes of Jell-O. The space after every death

is the same and must always need a mop and a broom.

Be with us at the services so that we remain seated

when the preacher, who did not know her, intones

litanies of sitcom scenarios and Hallmark homilies.

Let us nod when he says she never questioned God,

the only thing he got right. She’d long given up hope,

believing only in the sanctity of her own hands, slowly

mixing powders taking shape with a little water and time.  


"Losing It"
~John, 1966



Fresh PB&Js, a full encyclopedia set

with all day to read as the rain hit the tin of the roof above,

his two older sisters shaking their heads at him reading the world

like a novel and not the disjointed histories and facts of the truth.

He’ll remember the act, but nothing he read and he’ll wonder aloud

how he lost all the things that he knew at seven. Where had it gone?

Where was the rise of the British Empire? Where was the fall

of Byzantium? Where were the cases of Adler and Freud?

They were lost in Southern Hills, in the crackle of shock

treatments and meds and forcing himself to be real.

Maybe it fused him together and maybe it shattered him more

until he felt glowing like a Renaissance saint, like a star

and not just one more Thorazine script, one more real gone kid

with all of him broken to bits, no one winning but Smith, Klein, and French. 
 

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