Paul Juhasz

​The Envelope Please
 
Although I strive for randomness, shuffling and shuffling again, I know there are only two options in the envelope: Mrs. Peacock, who had castrated me years ago; or Colonel Mustard, that arrogant old prick, leering his judgment in monocle and jodhpurs. I often think of others, at home playing their own game, their envelopes filled with the arrogant erudition of Professor Plum, the predatory capitalism of Mr. Green—or if you’re into the whole MILF thing, the psychic trauma of sultry Miss Scarlet—and wonder if they, too, find this a flawed game.
 
The floor plan, for example, is quite ridiculous. A conservatory? Just what do they think they’re “conserving”? And if their commitment is so firm as to require an earmarked room for their efforts, why the secret passage to the lounge? The floor plan is also incomplete. It feels like this house should have a torture chamber. Or at the very least, a den of iniquity. Where are they supposed to hold the orgies? The ballroom seems too formal; the billiard room too cramped (and, believe me, getting stains out of felt is a real chore).
 
I have written several times to the people at Hasbro, suggesting updates. Why not, for example, modernize the weapons catalog, replacing the candlestick—I mean, does anyone even light candles anymore—with, say, a chainsaw, a flamethrower, or disapproval. The possibilities are limitless. Think of the enveloped elegance of Mrs. Peacock wielding narcissism, or the dreaded Colonel his preference for prepubescence. And they already have blunt-force-trauma covered with the wrench and the lead pipe. Why the overkill? The people at Hasbro have not, to date, responded.
 
Another rainy day. Another solitary game of Clue. I play by memory, for the rule book is always the first thing lost. The box says the game is for 2-6 players, but when we play for real, we play alone.

**

Pills

after Louis Jenkins
 
“they just make you feel better overall.”
 
Jenkins declares his preference for the large brown ones (although he admits he still takes the little yellow ones too), and The Matrix offers us a choice between the red one and the blue one—a false choice in this undeniably purple world. The green ones are nice. As are the pink ones. The black ones help recalibrate a soul too beguiled by platitudes. But almost no one ever mentions the oranges ones, which is a shame when you think of it. The white ones are too boring to mention, so I won’t, although I just did, which may tell you everything you need to know about this world of ours. The lavender ones, the turquoise and the vermillion all have their merits, although fans of these tend to overstate them, creating cults of color chiasmus. But please don’t get me started on the chartreuse ones, the cyan, or—God forbid!!—the puce, those colors we claim to know but fail to recognize out in the shrinking sensory world. Or perhaps, like the “banana” flavor used in candy, those colors don’t really exist in the natural world, are just another supplanting creation. I should point out merely in passing that penguins worship no pills at all and look how happy they are. Sliding down ice floes into the cold, blithe water. I bet they cry “Weeeeeee” in Penguin as they do. I bet they have long since stopped dreaming of flight. Grace Slick has told us of pills that make us larger, others that make us small, but she never mentions their color, so those claims remain highly doubtful. With all due respect, let us stick to this kaleidoscopic pharmacopeia that we worship with such levelled ceremony in the hopes something will fix what we’ve been told was broken, side-effects be damned and never mind the small print.

**

New Briefcase
 
By calling it that, I’m giving away my age, of course. Such terms are not used anymore. The Age of Briefs has ended. But “computer bag” seems too casually commercial, suggests this is nothing more than a temporary vessel (which, of course, it is), something used merely to transport a more valuable product from Point A to Point B, rather than a thing which gives witness. Or at least a thing which allows other things to give witness. In this sense, it is almost like an angel, or a Tomahawk missile, a foghorn or a dictionary.
 
Given my chosen career, it will become almost an appendage, a faux body part I take off each night and put on again each morning. Like a toupee. The only difference is, this does not cover a shame. Or, it covers a different shame.
 
This new one is made of canvas. I like the way it feels bouncing off my hip as I walk. Like an uncle I just met telling me I done good. It has a zipper and two straps with buckles. This means that compared to the old one it’s replacing, which just had the zipper, it takes longer to open and to close. The extra steps make a ceremony of leaving, as it should be.
 
I suppose by the same logic it would make a ceremony of arriving. But that, I cannot speak to just yet; there is still a bit of road, graveled half-path; still the hazy outline of Point B off in the distance, just beyond the empty lighthouse and the jagged coastline it sentinels. 

 **

The Sad Life of Cereal Bowls
 
Most of their lives are spent in closed-cabinet darkness, stacked atop one another in kiln-fired silence, pulled out only for lazy breakfasts, when eggs or bacon or even the finger-press ease  of Pop-Tarts seem too much effort. Selected in reverse order of a days-ago washing, they do nothing but sit and wait and mourn their casual codified label. Surely, they could hold something else, warm soup on a late October day, perhaps; or a collection of nuts set out for company—Brazilians. Almonds. Maybe Macadamia. Or even the relevant candies of our parsed-out holidays. 
 
But no, these are only cereal bowls. Called once such in the long ago, the label sticks, becomes fixed by cambered habit, and forever after, that’s how they’re known and that’s all they can ever be.

**
​
Love Poem
 
There are two ducks swimming in the small pond at the park. Mallards. One green head. The other, not. It does not matter how they got there. Whether together or separate. They are there now, swimming in the small pond at the park. It’s not even a real pond, actually. It’s just a depression in the mild hill separating the two halves of the park. It frequently fills with rain water, so it often appears to be a small pond. But it’s not. A negligence of trash outlines the sparse wet border. Bomb-shot bottles of bright green and purple. Empty. Foil Cheetos bag. Flaming Hot. The water in this not-a-pond the color of a child’s bath. There’s enough water today for the ducks to float, thinking duck thoughts. There was enough water yesterday too. And enough to reflect moonlight in the dark hours between. It seems fair, based on weather reports, to assume the water (and thus the ducks) will be there tomorrow as well. But that is yet to be determined. What can be determined, what we can say with unqualified certainty (with all appropriate apologies to Plato) is that right now there are two ducks swimming in the small pond at the park.
 
**
 
I Was Going to Buy a Wok Today
 
I was going to buy a wok today. I’ve been thinking of doing this for some time now. Been without one for over four years. Ex-wife got my old, tried and true one in the settlement. Been getting by with a common skillet, which works for searing a sirloin or for the ceremony of chicken in a tomato-basil sauce, but cannot return me to the days of pad thai or Szechuan pork.
 
But then I thought you might already have one. Seemed silly to double up on something that takes up so much cabinet space. True, we could get one of those hangy things that are like indoor wind chimes, but where you have to make your own wind, which, with these things, means banging your head against one of the dangling pans with sufficient force to make it collide with another and so on. 
 
But then we’d have a collection of pans randomly slamming into one another, creating such cacophony. And that would make it hard for me to read you the poem I wrote about you today. Best we make do with your cabinet space, limited though it may be.
 
And there are so many things you may or may not already have, so please forgive me if I spend some time in our early moments looking around your place, taking note of all things newly important, looking for any gaps I can eagerly fill, any strange object, perhaps in the back of the medicine cabinet or maybe in the hallway linen closet, that I’ll ask you to teach me about. In the full flush of this excitement of gap-discovering and strange-object-learning, there may be more important things to do than buying a wok today.
 
So I bought some Tupperware instead. We can never have enough Tupperware.

**

Paul Juhasz is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated author of six books, including four collections of poetry: Ronin: Mostly Prose Poems, a finalist for the 2022 Oklahoma Book Award, The Inner Life of Comics, The Fires of Heraclitus, a finalists for the 2025 Oklahoma Book Award, and his most recent collection of poetry, Katabasis, (Turning Plow Press, 20206) has been nominated for The National Book Award. He served as curator and coordinator of the Woody Guthrie Poets from 2020-2024, and currently lives in Oklahoma City.