by Joan Mazza
a woman overflowing urgency
a squirrel squabbling with its community
like ice creaking on a pond in deep winter
like logs crackling in a fireplace.
My voice is the hum of bees returning to their hive,
hungry after dancing to show where they’ve been.
It’s the rattle and scream of a train on a curving track,
the dream of vision for blind mole rats
and the clicks of echolocation of bats.
My voice sounds like remnants of DNA of my ancestors,
splattered with the soil of Sicily and the scent of lemons,
the clang of pots and the sizzle of garlic frying in olive oil.
It’s the giggle and waggle of the pressure cooker’s valve
letting out steam, holding optimum pressure and heat.
My voice contains all the work of my life—baby sitter,
candy girl, store clerk, assistant to a biology doing research
on Euglena. Listen to the cat skeletons and dogfish sharks
in formaldehyde. I wheel into classrooms on metal carts
that bump over the seams of cement floors. It is the scent
of a microbiology lab’s incubator where I grow pathogens,
the sizzle of a colony picked from the agar surface
with an inoculating needle, a glow in a Bacti-Cinerator.
Hear me speak before an audience about what I know—
how to make friends with your own mind, how to
embrace your recurrent nightmares and listen to what
they tell you. I will speak stories of those skilled
in awareness and kindness. My voice is filled
with disappointments, heartache, joy, and awe,
a dash of late wisdom, stirred and shaken,
an inner song that waits to awaken.
___
Joan Mazza is a retired medical microbiologist and psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six self-help books, including Dreaming Your Real Self. Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Prairie Schooner, Slant, Poet Lore, Slipstream, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.