"Urban Myth" [by Jamey Dunham]

Paul Muldoon selected Jamey Dunham's prose poem "Urban Myth" for The Best American Poetry 2005.

Urban Myth

            A couple awaiting the arrival of their first born delivers instead a ring-tailed lemur.  They are beside themselves.  The father beats the obstetrician with clenched fists.  He curses the nurses and flings himself to the floor bawling.  The mother stands up on the table and denounces God.  The next day they go home.  The lemur eats all of the houseplants and defecates in the sink.  It refuses to come down from the refrigerator and keeps them up all night chasing flies along the window screens.  The parents are mortified, but being optimistic people they remain patient.  They dress the lemur as a boy and name it Colin.  They send it to the finest schools and indulge it with every extravagance.  Finally their hard work pays off.  One morning upon entering the nursery they find a neat stack of money in the lemur’s place.

-- Jamey Dunham

Jamey Dunham has a new book of prose poems: The Bible of Lost Pets. Watch for it!

Comments

[Stacey]

I loved this poem when I first read it in BAP '05 and still love it. It seems to exemplify the prose poem, something that looks rather ordinary on the page but turns into a bizarre tale told with absolute conviction so that it seems true.