Rewriting Stella by Dan Tuttle

Author:Dan Tuttle [Tuttle, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912157167
Google: pzaKwwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 46667693
Publisher: Red Press
Published: 2019-11-05T20:49:10+00:00

216.

She woke in sweat with gasp as if her lungs

had stilled themselves throughout aquatic dream.

She bit her teeth upon her outstretched tongue

to stop their chattering. Her breath was steam

that populated air with haunted shapes.

Her stirring stirred up Ai, who whispered, “Stel,

what wrong?” in tone as if with mouth agape.

“It’s just a nightmare,” she replied, “I fell

into a flood and drowned, I lost control.”

Ai took that in. “You study so much, you

have stress, no break,” she said, tried to console

with logic’s explanation. Stel withdrew,

feared fact that visions left her mind unmade,

as stitching holding selves together frayed.

217.

“I think you see you most in charge,” Ai said,

“like do the things correctly then can make

the things you want to happen more, instead

of other things.” Stel heard through word mistakes

a reticence from Ai toward self-made ways,

a doubt that hustle’s real. Stel breathed and paused

to think of energy used every day

to mold her world, how much of it she’d caused

to go her way. It worked. It also crushed.

The high stakes testing Ai lamented too

hung heavy on Stel’s neck, yet clearly mushed

she and Abu to China. Misspent youth

is well-spent youth to some: rejecting friends

for facts accelerates the adults’ ends.

218.

At dawn a songbird covey made alarm,

reminding world to start afresh, a new

chance to exert control on earth, to farm,

turn produce from fields otherwise bamboo.

Ai’s words hung low in Stella’s waking mind,

who wondered if past bent too toward nerd’s deed,

directing so toward triumph she’d defined

herself. (She’d muse for years.) Meanwhile, birdseed

that Ayi’d scattered ’round the grounds brought brood

of wingéd friends from morning call to sills.

At breakfast, three small creatures came and cooed

from Marley’s Exodus, their rounded trills

reminding those familiar everything

would be all right. Stel’s reverie did spring

219.

upon the recollection of those words,

since reggae held a special place back home.

The bongo flava music she once heard

was hip-hop born from Rasta beat and tone.

Between two bites of saturated rice,

a porridge made from last night’s residue

that’s dense in calories to quite suffice

for day’s work in the fields, a lone cuckoo

descended when were absent other fowl.

The mother was delighted, turned to tell

the story of this cunning bird whose foul

adaptive parasitic habits well

ensured survival of her species. “She,”

began the lesson, “undeservedly

220.

lacks stamina to raise her hatchlings, but

must somehow keep her species live. So what

has she devised to get out of this rut?

A strategy thought uncompassionate

exploiting all her less quick-witted peers.

She waits until a mother bird flies free

then zooms down, finds one egg, and slides it clear

beyond the nest edge, drops her own, then flees

and hides again. When mother bird comes back

she’ll nurture equally this foreign egg,

not noticing it’s different from the pack.

And so the cuckoo gets what by own leg

she couldn’t have provided for her own,

except by using others’ stepping stones.”

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