Response to “Humor in Public Spaces” prompt
Drinking Juniper in July
I love the sound of her laughter coming down the stairs of this bar in the Netherlands which is playing Whitney Houston while the table next to me is full of twenty-something-year-old Dutch Girls talking, in Dutch, about Harry Potter. I know this because between the string of words, I hear something something maar Dumbledore, something something maar Hermione Granger, their tongues making soft guttural sounds with Hermione’s g’s, and one of the girls leans back in her chair. She stretches her arms behind her head, switches to English when she says, Bitch I should have cheated on him, and right on cue, breaks into song, singing It’s not right, but it’s okay, and the man behind the bar said yeah, Juliper is a good beer if you like beer. It’s the Dutch version of Bud Light only Dutch, so it’s better, and families are wheeling by on their bicycles, and Whitney’s song ends and Kate Bush begins, and upstairs Randi must be losing her mind she must be so happy to be surrounded by the song of a Dutch conversation group and Kate, of course, and I take a long deep breath.
The soft scent of cigarettes hang in the air. The insect crawling over my page looks like the flag of a subdued country. The girls are singing about running up that hill but they don’t quite know the words so they mumble their way through and they definitely don’t care and it’s there in the break of their song, between the known and unknown that I feel my body return to my body. I set down my pen. I sit inside the soft light of summer. I understand something then, about days designed just for this.
I love this prompt, though admittedly, it wasn’t an easy one for me to find a way through. I’d written another poem, one in which it had a similar pattern – an unexpected song in an unexpected place and the unexpected way my own body in space responded – but found it hard to balance the observed moment with the moment of a poem. Eventually, I had to set that one aside, but I do think that initial exercise taught me something because several months later, while in a bar in the Netherlands, I was given a second chance.
The first draft of this poem wasn’t too far off from the final one. I’d scratched it into a notebook almost in real time, but it was only later, after I’d returned back home to the US, after I could feel the weight of today’s political world making it hard to be still again, that I found myself returning to this poem for reasons that had less to do with poetry and more to do with my mind’s desire for the relief of that summer. So as I revised it, that’s what I sat with – how to take the spinning mind towards stillness, even if just for the moment.
Samantha Tetangco is author of Hope You Blend In: Studies in Color & Light (Broadstone Books, 2024). She is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of California Merced where she teaches creative writing, audio storytelling, and first-year composition.
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