Mannequin Envy
quarterly journal of poetic and visual art
Featured Artist:
Theresa Pfarr
More artwork by:
Cecilia Ferreira
This link will take you to our "old" site. I am still working on transferring all of Doug's files. You will have to use your browser's navigation buttons to return to the current issue.
Thea Iberall
Abracadabra
Words.
Some words stay around forever. Others
barely an eyeblink.
Slang words like daddio, groovy or rad
get old-fashioned, come and go within
a generation. They’re gone like your health
discarded as quickly as a friend who sleeps
with your lover when you go out of town.
Some words lose their reason for existence
bewray or spinning jenny or the name
I used to call you.
They get replaced, like friends are when we move
to a new town or the next passage in our evolution.
A computer used to be a job description.
Now it sits on your desk to document
the changes in your life.
Some words were there from the beginning.
I’m sure the first Englishmen
needed to speak of food and water and love
(before there was take out pizza and Perrier and betrayal).
These staple words are among the first we learn.
They stay around forever like college roommates
who won’t disappear just because
you are getting a divorce
or going through chemo.
And then, there are the really old words
inherited from ancient times. Words like sorrow
which came from the Old German sorega, which grew
from sraga, an Old Slavic word meaning
sickness. They’re so old you
don’t know why they are there
like your friendship with your second grade
classmate who taught you to make
high pitched noises through your nose.
Words like abracadabra
which meant “perish like the word”
when it began its cabalistic journey nearly
3000 years ago on the banks of the Euphrates.
Perhaps it began one night as a Chaldean mother
tried to comfort her ailing daughter by a warm hearth.
As a game, perhaps, or a play on her name. She whispered
abbada ke dabra over and over, each time with
one less letter, telling her the pain would go
away with each discarded a and r until all
that was left were the low embers
and her child’s sleeping form.
She smiled, just the way
you did, on the day you
said abracadabra and I
turned around and
you were
gone
| Bio:Thea Iberall is a poet, playwright, and scientist. She has been published in Rattle, Spillway, The Southern California Anthology, Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, Peregrine XVI, Apollo's Lyre, Sunspinner, poeticdiversity, and ONTHEBUS. She was a semifinalist in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition. Thea's chapbook Be Ye Love (Inevitable Press, 1997) is part of the Laguna Poets reading series. As a performance poet, Thea represented Los Angeles at the 1998 National Poetry Slam Competition. Her love of words and theatre have taken her into playwriting, and Thea has had staged readings and performances of her one-act plays and musicals. She has a Master's Degree in Writing (USC) and a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience (U Mass). |
