Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Some people delight in complaining about their ails and travails on social media. I myself do not. So when I contracted a debilitating case of poison oak over spring break, one that later became a staph infection, almost nobody knew about it. “To live is to suffer,” Nietzsche said (the Buddha might also have said something similar), and “to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” So over the last couple weeks I got to practice my willpower, and to reflect on the mind-altering side effects of the drugs I was prescribed. As this is National Poetry Month, I also found myself “finding some meaning” by writing poems, including one I unveiled at a Davis Arts Center reading yesterday, titled “Prednisone.” Containing a Pub Quiz allusion right at the start, this poem will stand in for my newsletter this week. Enjoy.
Prednisone
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for prednisone.
Yes, it’s prednisone, that oral steroid
and immunosuppressant that will cure what ails you!
When I told my doctor, himself a former marine,
that I was feeling a bit off, as if I had been topped off,
actually filled to the brim, and beyond the brim,
when I told him that because of the prednisone
maybe I was ‘roided up
like the strut-damnable villain in an action movie;
when I told him all this I could tell that he was taken aback.
His chair actually moved backwards.
He reminded me that prednisone differs significantly
from the anabolic steroids taken by professional wrestlers,
weekend weightlifters,
and high-school linebackers with muscle dysmorphia.
This drug prednisone is a horse of a different color.
I asked him, Is it a rainbow horse? Time to saddle up!
Tell me more about the side effects, doctor!
Talk me through my feelings. Be my therapist! Earn your co-pay!
Prednisone! It’s a corticosteroid!
Perfect for conditions such as arthritis, blood disorders, breathing problems,
severe allergies, skin diseases, eye troubles, and immune system disorders.
I wondered how one drug could be perfect for so many troubles.
Medical science seems to be dumbing down the standards for perfection.
Even more fun than the disorders would be the side effects.
These include weakness, weight loss, nausea, muscle pain,
headache, tiredness, and dizziness.
Ha! Where do I sign?
Not typically a drug user, once too tough for Tylenol,
and unaccustomed, for example, to caffeine,
my body responds to medications atypically, and intensely.
I wanted to tell the good doctor that I was a special case,
a sensitive poet, if you will.
At least I was sensitive before the prednisone.
Weight loss? Yes.
I finally dropped down to 160 lbs this week,
training weight, fighting weight,
but otherwise the side effects don’t apply:
I am feeling strong, rather than weak,
awake, rather than tired,
and tightrope sharp, rather than dizzy.
Someone bring me a tightrope.
What could go wrong? I’m on prednisone!
Boy, you look nice this evening.
Speaking of wrestlers, I will just move this couch for you by myself
with my remaining good arm.
That’s OK, I don’t need help carrying in these twelve bags of groceries,
for I am insensible to the many ways their plastic twiney handles
cut red canyons into my poison oak hands, my ragged claws.
I think we deserve a song at this juncture.
Nobody asked me to scat right about now, but that won’t stop me.
Brace yourself for my fricatives, plosives, and open vowels.
Anticipate my arpeggios as they inform the melodic lines
like a blooming calla lily, each petal a riff, you know,
a rough, the good stuff, the sniffed snuff.
This is the good stuff.
Come on, come on, help me do.
I’ve been feeding the rhythm.
Help me feed the rhythm.
The aging bulldog stops on each stair,
but is nevertheless eager to ascend to the second floor
where her mistress awaits.
Every household should have a Queen of Sheba.
Wishing to encourage the bulldog, I skip
up the stairs next to her, and then run back down.
I take the stairs two at a time
next to her, and then run back down.
She’s almost there. I take the steps three at a time.
Cassius says that Caesar “doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus,”
but nobody speaks of jealous Cassius today.
Meanwhile, the bulldog is still climbing.
Hey Bulldog, some kind of innocence is measured out in years,
and you don’t know what it’s like to listen to your fears.
I commend you for your effort, dear bulldog,
but my new friend prednisone
and I beat you to the top of the stairs.
Knock knock!
In additions to some of the topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on the following: bank robberies, notable universities, narrowness, football teams, books mentioned on the Times Online website, Persian legends, crime-fighters, lurches towards extinction, the one that got away, our silent seas, the end in mind, Pulitzer Prizes, angels in America, hearts, poetry in April, troublesome transitions, Tonya Harding, butterflies, automatic trust, the wives of race car drivers, data plan deserts, Disney films, mythical creatures, shadowy mangoes, brooks and rivers, plastics, U.S. presidents, manifestations of expressions, world capitals, the state of looming, current events, and Shakespeare.
After the jump, look for some information about Thursday’s Poetry Reading at the Natsoulas Gallery. We have Modesto poet laureate Stella Beratlis, and award-winning Stegner fellow Dana Koster. Meanwhile, I love how busy the pub has been on our Mondays together. I hope you can join us this evening.
Your Quizmaster
https://www.yourquizmaster.com
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http://www.facebook.com/yourquizmaster
Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Black Panther. Last week the film Black Panther claimed the number three spot on the all-time domestic box office chart, not adjusting for inflation. What film did it displace from that position?
- Anagram. What can make landfall in Northern California from October to April? Hint: The correct answer is an anagram of the common phrase ALPINE SEX PEPPERS.
- Charles Darwin. What is the name of the Cherokee-class 10-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy that is most closely associated with Charles Darwin?
P.S. Here’s the poetry reading information I promised you:
Poets Stella Beratlis and Dana Koster will read in Davis on April 19th!
The Poetry Night Reading Series is proud to feature two notable Modesto poets: Stella Beratlis and Dana Koster. They will perform on Thursday, April 19th at 8 P.M. at the John Natsoulas Gallery at 521 1st Street in Davis.
Stella Beratlis is the Poet Laureate of Modesto. Beratlis grew up in a Greek-American family in Northern California. Her work has appeared in Quercus Review, Penumbra, Song of the San Joaquin,In Posse Review, California Quarterly, and other journals, as well as in the anthology The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010). She is coeditor of the collection More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets (Quercus Review Press, 2011). Beratlis is a librarian in Modesto, where she lives with her daughter. Alkali Sink is her first collection of poems.
Lee Herrick, author of Gardening Secrets of the Dead, writes of Beratlis, “Stella Beratlis writes unforgettable poems that stir inside you long after you’ve finished reading them. Alkali Sink is simultaneously domestic and wild, urban and rural, full of surprises and wisdom. Your axis may shift after reading this remarkable book. Beratlis is a fierce talent whose beautiful mind encompasses the land, the open road, the kitchen window, and the heart’s inconstancies. Her first full-length collection is one of the best debuts I have read.”
Reading with Stella Beratlis will be Dana Koster. Dana Koster was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up in Ventura, California. She earned her English degree from UC Berkeley and MFA in poetry from Cornell University. From 2011-2013, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. She lives in Modesto, CA with her husband and sons, where she works as a wedding photographer.
Koster’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in EPOCH, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review, PN Review, Muzzle, Thrush Poetry Journal and many others. She has work in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, Haiku of the Living Dead and More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. In 2012, she was the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and a Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award. Her first book, Binary Stars, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 2017.