Bethany Schultz Hurst

Letter to Geppetto, Written on the Back of a Red Lobster Menu

O how humpback whale CDs looped over the nature store’s speakers
during the shifts I worked slightly hungover one summer 

at the mall during college. The store was dim and fake-tree forested
and I usually worked alone because they couldn’t afford more 

staffing. Anyways no one really came in except unattended kids
to riffle spendy windchimes, flip the mass-produced rainsticks

before darting back out to the corridors where it was brightly lit.
Management seemed resigned that the store was going under. I loved it 

there, indulgently air conditioned, but knew I’d soon bail. At shift’s end
I’d pull down the storefront’s metal gate and lock it, then step 

out into the larger container of the mall—which was also failing,
though I didn’t yet know it—then outside to America, another kind of listing 

ship. All of this to say, Geppetto, that I recognize this:
how you nested inside your wrecked vessel, inside the giant fish 

that swallowed you, inside the terrible ocean. How you made yourself
at home beneath the cathedral ceiling of its ribs. How that felt 

a little like mercy. In the dark parking lot, cars moored around Red Lobster,
which is bankrupt now because America kept heaping plates with globs of

Endless Shrimp, kept pounding Bahama Mamas, bottomless, from ridiculous
stretched-out glasses. O, Geppetto, how fake portholes made us feel as if 

we were sailing. The restaurant patrons were braying by the time
they stumbled out the door. My car marooned under sodium arc lights. 

Geppetto, you said some nights when the fish opened its mouth,
you could see the stars framed between its teeth. 

But that feels a little like a fib. A cassette stuck in my car’s deck
had been playing itself for months. When I at last extracted 

it, the shiny tape unspooled. I could not wind it back in. Geppetto,
should I tell you now the oceans are overfished? Whale bellies—for real though— 

stuffed with plastic? Or let your pretend boy pull you from the deep
again and back up to the surface? The tape kept unspooling. I keep 

looping back through an artificial forest. Dark interior of my car.
The holding tanks shimmering with rubberbanded lobsters 

waiting to be lifted out and plated in Seafood Combos.
And my own hands­ tangled up in strings of unplayable songs.

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Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author of Blueprint and Ruin (Southern Indiana Review Press), winner of the 2021 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and Miss Lost Nation (Anhinga Poetry Prize, Anhinga Press), finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and Verse Daily, and in journals such as Ploughshares, Narrative and The Gettysburg Review. She lives in Pocatello, Idaho, where she is a professor at Idaho State University.