Occhiolism
— The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.
I ordered bacon on a sandwich that comes with optional bacon
during a Thursday morning sandwich shoppe session.
I eaves dropped which requires stealth, and I am, according to one
friend, a ninja. The November air in an Ann Arbor February
felt like weather to golf in, this meant the hard ground buckled
underneath your boots, and the cold slips all the way through
to the sole. The reason I said bacon was because on the menu the shoppe
said bacon, ham, or sausage and I remember saying bacon. They
forgot the bacon but the guy who took my order was so nice that I just
ate the sandwich. It was a way for me to say my meal was almost
100% plant based––stupid eggs ruin everything. My wife had a miscarriage
on super bowl Sunday and the Rams won. Maybe the stupid seeds.
The teal snow fell like someone had buckets of white blood to pour over
the city. I thought I was being judged. I don’t know how to be direct.
I don’t smell like coffee anymore. The woman at the shoppe sitting across from
me was sitting with her friend as they talked about why they shouldn’t
break up with their boyfriends anymore. Another person behind me made eye
contact with me because I turned my head when they coughed. We
were right across the street from CVS, and I’m sure there was someone in there
buying water, the 100% Plant-less based drink. In the hospital
room I repeated my vows to my wife, and she did too without saying anything.
She just grabbed my hand, shook, and squeezed it tight. Someone from
the south would’ve said “she squoze it.” I couldn’t imagine a better word for the past
tense of squeeze, other than squoze, I think it isn’t a word because phonetically,
how would you go about spelling a word? And how did any word get spelled
before it got spelled, and how come they chose letters instead of numbers
and numbers instead of letters. A word could look like 300000, and a phone number
could look like I-ATR-YGED. Which when unscrambled would mean tragedy
or tyranny. One of these is a lie, but the scope of a lie is just a hole in the truth.
And what else would you find after calling that number, except lies
and Approximately 3 million callers ahead of you. This was the number
we searched when asking how many times this happens a year,
and to whom it happens too. Whom sounds like womb. After my sandwich tray was
empty, I took my napkin and tossed it in the garbage, ran quickly
out of the shoppe. I didn’t want the people sitting next to me to know that
I had experienced a loss of bacon. I wrote a poem that ended
with, God knows what he is doing, and I don’t have to. I truly believe that ending feels
the way it does. I truly believe that I don’t have to know anything. Apparently,
there was mistake at the doctor’s office because a sample wasn’t sent alongside the blood,
and I don’t know about you, but bacon is always terrible when it isn’t fully
cooked. Maybe they left the bacon out because of some defect and the bacon
couldn’t fry like it was supposed to. Everything reminds me to trust God.
And what if the numbers and letters were replaced and the binary code looked like
noonnononnononnonnnonono,
which would take you to a website endorsing plant-based meats. We were really close
to finding out the gender of the baby, and we had names picked out regardless.
Neither of the names were mine, it was not going to be a junior. The etymology of junior
is not that surprising. It is an adjective, from the Latin: “lesser standing, more recent”
“a person younger than another; one of less experience or standing,” “opposite of seniority.”
The Sandwich shoppe was probably closed on super bowl Sunday, maybe that’s
when they forgot to order the bacon.
Robert Laidler, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Wayne State Department of English, is the author of a poetic libretto, The Fallen Petals of Nameless Flowers, which premiered at Chamber Music Detroit in 2022. He earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where he is currently a Zell Fellow. His poems have won various awards and have been published in a number of places. He enjoys music, eating, and eating while listening to music.