{"id":91489,"date":"2021-06-26T13:34:19","date_gmt":"2021-06-26T17:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/?p=91489"},"modified":"2021-06-26T13:34:19","modified_gmt":"2021-06-26T17:34:19","slug":"poem-5-abba-and-shawshank-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/poem-5-abba-and-shawshank-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"Poem 5: ABBA and Shawshank, Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

ABBA and Shawshank, Revisited<\/strong><\/p>\n

The woman in my dream last night told me<\/p>\n

she wants to give her husband away. Not on loan,<\/p>\n

mind you, but for good. They have such different<\/p>\n

tastes in food. She loves to eat dumplings<\/p>\n

steamed in a pot of chicken soup simmering all morning,<\/p>\n

she wants to drink mojitos all afternoon, the mint and lime<\/p>\n

adding zing to her mouth. Who doesn\u2019t want extra zing<\/p>\n

in their mouths? She said she hasn\u2019t figured out<\/p>\n

what to do with her hands. So when she\u2019s<\/p>\n

on the road and comes to a stoplight,<\/p>\n

she finger-dances to Abba blaring on the radio:<\/p>\n

Ooh, you can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life<\/em>,<\/p>\n

the index finger on both hands kicking a can-can.<\/p>\n

The mistake she made is the light turned green<\/p>\n

and she stayed there dancing her hands without<\/p>\n

gunning the gas and got rear-ended. Now the cop<\/p>\n

(dressed neatly with no food stains on his lapel)<\/p>\n

wants to know her reason for not moving. She tells him:<\/p>\n

Ooh, see that girl, watch that scene, digging the dancing queen,<\/em><\/p>\n

her fingers kicking in time to the beat, so he<\/p>\n

handcuffs her and takes her to the pokey, and<\/p>\n

as a lover of irony, she teachers her cellmates<\/p>\n

to do the Hokey Pokey. But they only serve slop to inmates,<\/p>\n

and she wants more (don\u2019t we all?), so she takes the plastic spoon<\/p>\n

and starts scraping in the wall. She figures if Andy and Red<\/p>\n

could break out of Shawshank, she can break out<\/p>\n

of county lock up. Protect the right for us to bear<\/p>\n

dumplings, protect our homes with dough<\/p>\n

boiled for 10 minutes, cover on. Anything will plump up<\/p>\n

and blossom with steam and enough time. All she had<\/p>\n

was an overnight, and it was back to the streets for her,<\/p>\n

dancing with her fingers at every intersection, red or green<\/p>\n

light shining their bright color on her like a Rothko.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ABBA and Shawshank, Revisited The woman in my dream last night told me she wants to give her husband away. Not on loan, mind you, but for good. They have such different tastes in food. She loves to eat dumplings steamed in a pot of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3235,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-half-marathon-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3235"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91496,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91489\/revisions\/91496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}