Lavender

By Joanna Fuhrman

“Being in a funk” is what the cool people call it.

It’s the purple that surrounds the scene at the lake.
Not sad enough to actually drown.

You say, ‘Tm in a funk,” and I think you think
you’re too pretty, too well groomed,
too stylishly disheveled, to actually sulk.

Have you ever tried drinking a milkshake
with a girlfriend in a funk?

She just stares at the straw as if sucking on it
would allow the whole world into her mouth.

When a teenager wears baggy sweatpants
all February, her math teacher may ask her
if she’s in a funk.

(She’s actually just pissed off.)

Frogs don’t get into funks, but toads do.

In the Bible, Abraham thought Sarah was in a funk,
but she was actually shaking with grief.

When her baby arrived, her 100-year-old flesh
quivered like a sliced papaya.

There is nothing funky
about being in a funk.

The Polish biochemist Casimir Funk
invented vitamins.

How long can you hold on to
a mummified cat

when the the building is
already burning?

Sometimes I just want to use
my own hands.

The golfer Fred Funk wore a pink skirt
to settle a bet with Annika Sörenstam.

Doing cartwheels or changing the bed sheets
are suggested cures for getting out of a funk.

To be in a funk is to want to cry,
but to be unable to access tears.

To be in a funk is to be unable to hear
the music in the subway’s rattle.

If Virginia Woolf had been in a funk,
she would have filled her pockets
with dead lilacs instead of rocks.

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