Reptile House
I always go to it first—just me and the other sweaty people, the elderly, the breastfeeding.And me, childless and tall. Frogs are not reptiles but you'll find themin the reptile house. In seventh grade I fell in love with Dendrobatidae,poison dart frog. Tiny deadly jewels in their velvet green boxes. That sideof the reptile house was always wet, fronds dripping. Even then I calledthe spikes of ferns fronds. I had to be known as smart, because smartwas all I had. That and crooked teeth, thick glasses. I had new bracesthat turned my smile into a silver EKG, a favorite store that the other girlsin my new class, through snickers, let me know was a thrift store. In the reptile house,other people can only see the outline of your hometrimmed bangs, can't readany of the labels on your clothes. Snake eyes don't have eyelids—they have a scale called, of course, a spectacle. Snakes don't blink,give nothing away. I was in middle school— of course I recognized thatdisinterest when it held me in its gaze. You can spend half a day in the reptile houseand only see three things move. You learn to be patient, to breathelike you're meditating. I never touched the glass in the reptile house—instead, I ran my sore tongue over and over the metal in my mouth.The orthodontist promised that braces would soon charm my teeth into order.In the reptile house, I longed for fang.
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- September 28, 2024
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“Reptile House” from The Anxiety Workbook by Christina Olson © 2023. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press
Christina Olson is the author of The Anxiety Workbook (Pitt Poetry Series, 2023) and The Last Mastodon (Rattle, 2019). Other work appears in The Atlantic, The Missouri Review, The Nation, Scientific American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is an associate professor at Georgia Southern University and tweets about coneys and mastodons as @olsonquest.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
"Keats tells us that ‘poetry should surprise by a fine excess,’ which is to say that Keats might be a little jealous of Christina Olson’s The Anxiety Workbook. Her work always surprises, either by way of humor or confession or observation or reflection or lyricism—sometimes all in the same poem. Few poets could make the Venn diagram of personal anxiety, a deep interest in mastodons, COVID pandemic anxiety, adulting, body image concerns, and Caddyshack feel inevitable, but by some miracle, Olson is able to achieve the nearly impossible. Her voice is a mixture of knowing and not-knowing, humor and grave seriousness. It feels smart and timely. This is a fantastic book."
—Dean Rader
"A thing I love about Christina Olson’s poems is the lightly off-kilter lens through which she examines the world, the way she invents and discovers beauty from unlikely sources. There are plenty of terrible things to worry about in The Anxiety Workbook, but also classic movies, reality television, wondrous flora and fauna, the Oregon Trail, and mastodon bones. Olson writes, ‘It’s not suffocation if it’s beautiful,’ so breathe. Breathe in this awesome book and all its disarming gorgeousness. These poems are heartachingly fresh."
—W. Todd Kaneko
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