Image courtesy NBC
I refuse to calculate how many hours I’ve spent
listening to Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s Zack to the Future podcast,
reminiscing about a TV show that was a childhood staple,
Zack and Kelly and Slater and Jessie and Lisa and Screech
the teenagers I thought I’d grow up to be,
as an eight-year-old
watching two episodes every day after school.
In pre-covid times,
I’d feel guilty over all these hours
spent rehashing absurd plotlines
about teenagers forced into fake marriages
for a class project,
or clairvoyant powers
granted by lightning strike.
But this is one of the few things lately
to make me laugh—
truly laugh
until I need to catch my breath—
and it’s clear that now
there are no guilty pleasures,
only pleasures,
only each of us
doing whatever we can
to manage each and every day.
Elizabeth Dingmann Schneider lives and writes in Minneapolis. Her collection Blood is available from Red Bird Chapbooks, where she formerly served as a poetry editor. Elizabeth’s work has also been published in Sleet, Naugatuk River Review, the What Light Poetry Contest, Commons Magazine, Mosaic, the Saint Paul Almanac, Streetlight Magazine, and Motherscope Magazine.