I grew up in a house of coded language.
For example, when Dad was home with Rudy and Splintz hanging out, and some other guy was there, too, sitting on our leather couch, Dad would say something like “I’m goin’ in the kitchen to make me a ham sandwich,” I knew that that meant something else.
We’re Jewish and he hates ham sandwiches.
He’d go into the kitchen, then Rudy and Splintz, hanging out by the doorway, Splintz with his everpresent cig between his lips, would walk toward the guy on the couch, say, “Let’s go for a little drive,” (Benny, that one time) just like in the movies only this wasn’t no movie– and would stand the guy up and lead him to the door, saying “Later, Twigs,” though my name was Robert, cause, at twelve, I was a skinny guy then, and that’s what they called me, before they shut the door and the guy they’d walked out I’d never see again.…
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“All death is suffocation,” Travis Gott overheard an ER nurse say as she strode briskly past his bed. He felt his heart rate rise. He’d been brought into this Lake Arrowhead hospital on an ambulance gurney not half an hour earlier. It was nearly midnight. A white plastic ID bracelet now encircled his left wrist like a small pale snake that’s swallowed its own tail. He wore on his right ring finger a black onyx class ring.
“Choking, strangulation, drowning,” Travis heard another unseen nurse say, “those work. What others?”
“Kidney failure, heart disease, they all ultimately result in pulmonary collapse,” answered the first nurse. “That’s how we die.” Travis’ breathing, already thready, quickened as he imagined his lungs – those pinkish-gray bellows – locking up forever.…
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I find a map and ignore Chicago,
you don’t exist, your warehouse
collapsed with you inside.
I can’t forget that you forgot.
I was 17,
running away,
reaching toward validation and adventure.
Just making a mess,
with open hands and a dead black heart,
pumping toxicity and fossil fuels through each vein.
I find a car on the side of the road,
take the 70 East until I can see smoke,
from the industrial plant
outside the airport.
The air smells like flight.…
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While students are confusing with their chatters
the classroom atmosphere as at the wooden desks
they take their seats before the lesson starts,
a bird glides through the open window,
swooping on th’ irridescent sunlight filtered by the trees
brimmed with the scent of the moon–budded dew,
and ushers in the glimmer of a halo
distilled upon the ripples of the sable beak
and pupils taking shape before the eyes
of one shy student, who, poised for the boredom
of the inevitable victory of time o’er dreaming,
reflects: ‘and yet the birds still pour
from branching shadows in the trees
their pure melodious gold to celebrate
th’ invisible refulgence of a light
that permeates the sky without restraints
even if my pensive moods can’t feel it.’…
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What color do you see when I say Donizetti?
This question lingers. This question torments.
I visit Flint, my boss. This is after his family says he suffered a mental break. It is during the pandemic. His family thinks Flint is a bit selfish to have an emotional collapse when medical resources are stretched thin. Yet despite the pandemics, the failure of democracy, the power outages, the collapsing economy, he is installed in a private room in a sanitarium. A vintage 20-volume print set of the Oxford English Dictionary is delivered and set up on bookshelves. Since his mental incident, Flint’s eyes lighten as if they reflect a fading sunset. His family says the medicines affect the pigment in the iris of his eyes. My doctor says she knows of no medication that does this.…
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It wasn’t until he’d decided to kill himself that Joel Barkley gained the relief meds and booze had failed to provide. Fading fast was the guilt for having laid off the employees at his floundering art gallery. Ditto the night sweats over his landlord’s increasingly loud threats to put his “shit out in the street.” And, as always, there was his dysphoria, still there, but content to play third fiddle to more immediate concerns. In their place, he contemplated the “how” (swallowing a 45 hollow point) and the “where” (his parents’ stately home). But it was the “when” – a party celebrating his mother stepping away from a lucrative 35-year career shrinking the heads of Charleston’s upper crust – that brought him more peace than hearing Goodnight Moon as a child. …
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Staring intently into the mirror
I can see the bones beneath my face,
a rigid armature
that would take
fierce will to break,
architecture that’s endured
decades of menacing weather.
Pressing pencil against paper,
I trace the ridge of cheekbone,
the shadow pooling at my temple,
winding up the long stretch
of my inherited grandfather’s forehead,
to that bulging vein
I blame on my father’s rage.…
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