Alexandra van de Kamp
​

Being Unhappy Shortens Your Life

When I was 13, I thought the isosceles
triangle a magnificent thing—a shape

with two sides of equal length
reassured me of a certain reliability

sewn into the world; something solid
and clean lined, unlike my mother

bouncing $3 checks at the grocery store.
But I want to live a long life, so I’m going

to look up words, like pericardium
and learn the heart is enclosed

in “a fibrous sac” that keeps it separate
from the lungs. Is it correct to assume

that happy is the opposite
of unhappy? Sarah Vaughan’s voice

filling up the radio on my drive home
the opposite of my mother sitting alone

unable to boil an egg
until her caregiver arrives.

How do we set up our equations
in this life? A red cardinal =

summer or winter
depending on the hemisphere.

I’m told if I exercise three times a week--
a brisk walk with the sidewalk purring

beneath me—my life will extend,
rolling out before me like a feisty ribbon.

Does the heart really know
what it needs?

My father collapsed
over his keyboard one evening.

He had eaten a sandwich for dinner,
worked out at the gym. My stepmother

found him slumped in his pajamas
because she wanted to ask him a question.

He was already bluing
in the face. Is to blue a verb?

After typing those earlier words,
it makes me a touch happier

to consider this. The first known
mention of blue--from the Proto-Germanic

and Old French--described “fair blu cloth”
in a collection of saints’ lives

circa 1300. We are always
onto the next thing, our minds

tick ticking. Right now,
I’m considering marmalade,

and how I used to hate it
until I was living in Madrid,

when my roommate, Maria,
brought back jars

from her hometown in Valencia.
And, one morning, its sweet,
​
buttery texture,
made my mouth gleam.

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Alexandra van de Kamp is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. Her three books of poems are Ricochet Script (Next Page Press 2022), Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press 2016) and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (CW Books 2010). She has also published several chapbooks, including A Liquid Bird Inside the Night (Red Glass Books 2015) and Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Her poems have been published in journals nationwide, including The Cincinnati Review, The Texas Observer, Tahoma Literary Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and elsewhere.