See the penguin? Look close. Am tempted to find out when Pepsi last put penguins on their soda cans. Dated or faded? Anyone know?
***
Last thing before sleep I counted dinner guests. I stopped at twenty who say they're coming but remember just now one other I forgot. Thursday, Francisco Aragon, Maria Melendez, and Steven Cordova arrive around five. Dinner is at seven. When you get into town, friends, call me so I can meet you at your hotel and get you over to my place before the crowd arrives.
***
And no the landlord did not get my message. Avoiding the kitchen this morning though I need tea badly. Can't wash the new blender and put it to use. Can't wash yesterday's dishes. Can't clean chilis. May as well go teach a couple of classes.
***
Arrived home to find my landlord prostrate before my sink pipes which are everywhere on the floor. Been here most of the day, he said slowly, as if gauging how to feel about it. He is a quiet, thoughtful person. The sort who is likely more thoughtful and more quiet when he's angry. He is wondering but not asking, not directly, what I've poured down the sink that "looks like dirt." I tell him I water the hanging geraniums in the sink. Or that I used to. That these days I put a bucket beneath them. His expression doesn't change. He says the clog is in the mysterious pipe--"the vent"--that runs through my kitchen counter into the floor and roof simultaneously. At the T or the Y joint, he says. I see he doesn't know which, T or Y. Because the joint is in the wall, inaccessible. Which is part of the problem. I tell him my stepfather is a master plumber. He raises an eyebrow. I almost say and just landed a job as city inspector and just passed the exam certification with flying colors, but catch myself. I say instead that my brother is also a plumber, that I'm embarrassed I don't know more about it. The house has proper plumbing he says, so there's a vent. The vent is necessary, has to do with water levels. The vent exits somewhere on the roof. I nod. I don't know what our conversation is about; I am nervous and talking the way some things use feelers. The way plumbers use snakes.
***
And now a plumber must be called.
***
Twenty feet of water or more backed up in the pipes below my kitchen sink: up to two weeks of draining on my schedule of sink use. My brother once talked to me about water levels, the exacting pressure that achieves the perfect arc[h] of a drinking fountain--and how difficult, and how profound. A drinking fountain. Plumbers know these things. The laws of water and air and containers. The pipes wind through the house. I think of joints. Which are also articulations.
***
Lotta black muck, my stepfather says. Yeah. Smells bad huh he says. Yeah.
***
Yeah.
***
