Prozeugma (pro-zoog’-ma): A series of clauses in which the verb employed in the first is elided (and thus implied) in the others.
I was making a difference. As I was, I was hoping the world was becoming a better place. One year ago, I had spent the day writing a poem about a cloned rabbit that was sure to be published in the literary magazine I subscribed to. The magazine was titled “Elevator News” and it was devoted to publishing “all forms of writing that lift us up.” They had been publishing since 1908. Their most famous editor was Robert Ice. He published “Mt Foot Fell Off.” It was a poem written by a WWI soldier who had endured the travails of trench warfare. It’s gripping portrayal of the soldier hopping across the train platform to embrace his girlfriend when he returns from the war, captures the cruelty of absence when he falls and bloodies his nose and his girlfriend, backing away in horror, falls off the platform and is crushed by the Lakeshore Limited, on which, her father is a Conductor. He is clutching a little toy bear—a gift for his illegitimate little daughter who lives in Utica, New York with her gin-soaked diseased prostitute mother.
When I read this I cried for twenty minutes. Robert Ice was himself a genius elevating the “maudlin” to heretofore impossible heights. Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” marks the apogee of maudlinism’s movement. My poem about the death and eating of a child’s cloned rabbit—“Rabbit Dinner”— attempts to forcefully resurrect Ice’s maudlinism by naming the rabbit “Gene” and portraying the boy’s tortured employment of heirloom silverware to dismember, slice up, and consume the rabbit, sopping up its gravy with a buttered piece of his mother’s homemade sourdough bread. After eating Gene and cleaning his plate, the boy looks at his reflection in his bread-burnished dish, seeing only his satisfied face crowned by Gene’s yellowish-gray femur. The boy goes to bed, goes to sleep, and dreams he is a truck driver.
I must admit, as I write this synopsis of “Rabbit Dinner,“ I am reminded of the poem’s excellence and perfect fit to maudlinism’s key rubrics. It vividly exemplifies the historical place of the rabbit in the food chain, and achieving the status of pet, and even given a name, it may nevertheless be eaten without a second thought—like a leek or a tomato.
We slaughter cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits, ducks, goats and the rest of the barnyard animals. Why? Because we eat them. If we don’t intend to eat it, we simply kill it and deprive it of it’s life. I killed a newborn kitten by stepping on it accidentally. I killed a deer and a raccoon too—I ate them. The kitten I couldn’t eat. I wrapped it in plastic wrap and buried it out in the woods behind my house. It’s mother didn’t care. If somebody had stepped on me when I was a baby, my mother would’ve cared. Or would she?
Oh, enough of this neurotic rambling. I apologize for pushing this piece of writing downhill. I just hope the current editor of “Elevator News” isn’t a stupid ass like the editors of “Literary Fortune,” “Wet Metaphors,” “No Rhyme,” “The Canyon Review,” and the 18 additional literary journals who rejected “Rabbit Dinner.” I will not give up. After reading “Rabbit Dinner” one of the critics said “A picture is worth 1,000 of your words.” That hurt. I wrote back, “You don’t know 1,000 words. Haha!” That’s the kind of wit I will be famous for.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
Buy a print edition of The Daily Trope! The print edition is entitled The Book of Tropes and is available on Amazon for $9.99. There’s a Kindle edition available too.
The Daily Trope 