SHEVAUN BRANNIGAN’s work has appeared in such journals as Best New Poets, AGNI, and Slice. She is a recipient of a Barbara J. Deming Fund grant, and holds an MFA from Bennington College.
NOTES ON READING FROM THE AUTHOR:
I'm so scared for the future of humans.
AUTHOR’S SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRING:
EVERYONE WHO LOVES RON HOWARD WILL ONE DAY DIE
At some age I started crying at laugh tracks
on The Andy Griffith Show. The studio audience
filing in to stadium style seating and applauding
at APPLAUD and laughing at LAUGHTER and sometimes
other times too, their hands met
in wild unison at Opie, played by Ron Howard, running on stage.
How many of their hands are eaten away and folded over
their rib cage and the thin layer of skin that might remain.
Or arthritis afflicts them in the nursing home where TV remotes
have big buttons, or they don’t remember
filing in the stadium style theatre for filming because
they were just children, but their mothers reassured them that
Ron Howard looked right at you.
In 2014 Ron Howard was arrested in Arkansas
because of his uncanny resemblance to a local escaped convict.
They shoved him in the back of the cruiser
while he cited movie after movie he’d directed,
and only let him out when he cried, I am Opie!
I never watched Happy Days because of the title,
though I understand a recurring trope
was The Fonz, played by Henry Winkler,
hitting the side of a juke box to make it start its song.
But did his hand ever break the glass? I’d ask my father,
who struggled to explain what made The Fonz cool.
Did he ever shatter the glass and there was just blood gushing all over the 45s?
I can’t go to work because I’m researching
bomb shelters in the abandoned subway lines.
When Henry Winkler dies, when Ron Howard dies,
how will we mourn the American male?
No, I mean, if America dies, and Opie comes running
in on the TV screen left on in another country
does he live still when it cuts to credits
and the audience claps their hands,
claps their
hands, claps their hands, claps
their hands, the audio technician’s fingers raising the sound to fade it away,
and if America were a mini-series, can you see the cancellation
heading toward us like an errant shopping cart in the parking lot?
How close is it and is there time to move.