About the column: 

Poems of our Climate is a weekly poetry column run by Oliver Egger, ’23. Oliver Egger also runs the literary magazine group Route 9, which is currently accepting submissions for its poetry zine, The Lavender. If you would like to submit poetry to The Lavender go to tinyurl.com/wespoetry. If you are interested in having your poem featured in this column, Poems of our Climate, please email your work directly to oegger@wesleyan.edu. 

 

Wesleyan Parents

By Oliver Egger, ’23

 

Before you were born

We’d eat cheap Chinese food

On futons in horrible cities 

We hated and cry

About communism and cornflakes

While smashing wine glass after wine glass

On every white surface we owned

Like mentally-deranged priests

We baptized our spaces with blood

 

Before you were born

We’d lay in long white robes 

Discuss the end of this mortal toil

Then peel the cloth off each other’s bodies

Come as close as we could and lick the salt

Off of each other’s necks like sick puppies

Putting each other down

With hot licks of the needle and knife

Oozing into the floorboards

Till we both whimpered like a wounded breeze

 

Before you were born

We’d point at temples of rust

And rub our noses at it

Leave snot as sanctuaries

To our bohemian better-than-you bliss-baby lives

As we lurched forward like lifeless silhouettes 

Then called our parents

Without saying much

But asking for a few more bucks

For rent and maybe a “thrifted” tee

From an expensive consignment store

That says something sarcastic 

Like: “GOD BLESS THE USA”

 

Now that you’re born

We bless your body in Patagonia fleece flesh

And carry you like a cross

Up each Montessori School mountain

Plopping you like a christmas tree star

On the peak private school in town

So you can get into college, and have fun

But not too much fun, of course

And so you can finally leave the world 

A bit better than it was

After you die.

 

Oliver Egger can be reached at oegger@wesleyan.edu