Rob Stephens

January 27, 2019

“Upon Further Review” by Rob StephensPosted by

Rob Stephens

UPON FURTHER REVIEW

Upon further review, the camera clearly shows
two bodies colliding like rams. Or was one man
a saint, drumming down the conflict? Can we all agree

that there should have been no contact?
Where were the referees? Where were the chaperones?
Why didn’t somebody throw a flag? The camera

clearly shows that one man was a smirking boy, the smirking
boy smirking that he got away with no penalty,
with this collision of two bodies, with the knowledge

that he was caught on camera, that from a particular
angle he was leading with his helmet. Don’t ignore
your own eyes—when you wear that hat,

it’s clear whose team you’re on. Come on—there’s no way
you can miss the blatant targeting from this angle.
If you rewind, you hear the crowd tossing those slurs,

those careless tomahawks. What the camera
doesn’t show is the lawsuit coming. Upon further review,
we’ve decided to sue. Everyone feels ripped

off. Upon further review, it’s clear the ball was uncatchable.
The camera shows a shit ton of testosterone
blinding everyone, but when you see the smirk on smirking

boy’s face, you’ll understand why so many penalties
were missed. You’d understand why nobody walked away
feeling like a saint, why everybody felt rammed.

Why, everybody? Upon further review, there was never
a ruling on the field, and what the camera
really shows is that although we all claimed we were praying

while the teams stared each other down, we were actually
losing our religion. Or were we honoring it,
which is to say, holding fast to whatever ball we were about to drop?

—from Poets Respond
January 27, 2019

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Rob Stephens: “I am interested in the way that the public’s response to two events this past week—the Rams vs. Saints controversial call and the incident involving the Nathan Phillips and the Covington High School—both seemed to be shaped by camera angles and mob response. The more that the camera zoomed out from the initial incident, the more that the issues became more complicated than they were originally presented, and the more that everybody seemed like they were left feeling robbed in some way.” (web)

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March 14, 2013

“Dammit and the Placenta” by Rob StephensPosted by

Rob Stephens

DAMMIT AND THE PLACENTA

A week before my birth a cement truck sideswiped Mom’s Volvo
and I clutched placenta like a safety bar on a roller coaster,
but I let go when they wrapped forceps around my malleable skull

to yank me through the C-section so I came out with a head
like a dented orange not eight months after I was conceived,
a premature boy who 24 years later still eats Oreos before bed

and wants to be the little spoon when cuddling. At age eleven
I was the only kid at overnight camp still wearing comic-themed
briefs, and older boys popped the elastic bands of my underwear

against my ass until I shouted “quit it, dammit!” so they called me
“Dammit” like it was my name: “Dammit’s too slow for battleball,”
“Stop whining, Dammit, go to sleep,” and I wish that my placenta

was at camp because Malaysians believe the placenta is the baby’s
older sibling, and Nigerians give it a full funeral, believing it has life,
but in Louisiana we just incinerate the thing without spreading the ashes.

If my name’s Dammit then my placenta’s name was Shithead,
and for months we debated whether Santa prefers Oreos or Chips Ahoy,
discussed parallel universes made of Legos or Lincoln Logs,

and criticized the Justice League for leaving out Spiderman even though
he was a Marvel hero—maybe that’s why I bought Spiderman panties
for my ex-girlfriend before she dumped me for drooling on her boob

one night. Have you ever seen a placenta? They look like plastic bags
of red gravy and meatballs, my favorite dish, not that I’m a placentophagist.
I wish my parents buried my placenta with a tree like Hawaiians do,

perhaps the pecan tree that grew in our yard and dropped hundreds
of nuts every year. At camp I dreamed that baby Jesus
with his little halo hovered behind me snapping my comic book briefs,

but he didn’t chortle like the camp boys, he condemned me
for saying the word “dammit.” If Shithead went to camp he would hide
in the cabin closet until lights out then emerge like a gory hidalgo

waving veins and mucus at those older dudes to terrorize them
or pretend to be a bloody amoeba in the toilet when they tried to pee.
The ex-girlfriend, let’s call her Spiderwoman, complained that I blabbered

non-sequiturs in my sleep like “I’m a Lilliputian / Santa Claus
and snowballs!” and I was so impressed my subconscious referenced
Jonathan Swift that for Halloween I dressed as Gulliver with Lego

men hanging from my shirt, but nobody guessed who I was. Shithead
would have known. I bet he would be the big spoon,
he would wipe the drool off his boob and not mention it in the morning,

tell me that baby Jesus was a superhero and superheroes don’t bully
civilians like that. And though Mom tells me about the emergency C-section,
how they sucked the fluids out my lungs, hooked me up to a ventilator,

didn’t let her hold me for the first two days I was alive, she doesn’t mention
birthing the womb-brother who loved me before I could imagine
mean baby Jesus.

—from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

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Rob Stephens: “I write poetry because I want to create a turn of phrase as witty as John Lennon’s ‘Norwegian Wood’: ‘I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me’; because I want to write a Bach fugue, intricate as a wasp hive; because I want to be as sexy as the bassoon in Stravinksy’s le sacre du printemps. So I saunter over to the keyboard, bang out a few notes, and hope to create a decent melody.”

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