Cassowary

Write a poem about a phobia,

the prompt commanded,

which seemed more appealing to me

than to have to use all five of my goddamn senses

to describe the summer evenings of my childhood.

Yet

I can’t write a whole poem about vomit,

which is probably my strongest phobia.

Who would want to read it?

I suppose I could describe my terror

at the sight of a small gray mouse

darting unexpectedly across the back of my stove.

It seemed so much larger in my mind

than it did when we had caught it

in the live-catch trap.

(The only thing more terrifying in my mind

than knowing a live mouse is dancing across my food

is seeing a dead mouse on my kitchen floor,

so live-catch traps it is.)

I freed the creature in a field,

while holding a black leash

attached to an excited and confused Giza,

whom I had brought with me for protection and emotional support,

I screamed as I shook the mouse out of the black plastic trap,

and it scurried away.

I also have a horror of cassowaries.

This would be a rational fear if I lived in Australia,

less so in Schaumburg, Illinois.

When I was a young child with an outsized reading ability,

my mother bought me several volumes of the Charlie Brown ‘Cyclopedia.

Oddly, this children’s book mentioned that a cassowary

had the power to kill a man with a single kick.

This sounded me to me then as a terrible way to die,

and now, it’s not what I personally would choose

as a method of execution.

When I see this wild dinosaur bird in zoos

with its round black body,

furious eyes,

bright blue neck and angry red wattle, warning your doom,

the wedge-shaped casque on the top of its skull,

which I’m sure it uses to ram its head square into your chest,

powerful legs,

and those horrible man-killing claws on its feet,

I shudder a little,

respecting its power and ruthlessness.

They’re kind of the same thing as ostriches and emus,

if you think about it,

and an ostrich or an emu could certainly fuck you up,

but they don’t inspire the same primal fear

as the horrible cassowary,

God’s avian assassin.