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in the wrong direction.

  Not even in the right house—

  I wandered aimless into Sheol.

  Understandable for a lost Jew-

  sow like myself. Abandoned,

  I believed our nondescript hell.

  Our father’s left us

  to find it in the mind.

  I try to describe

  but it comes out Heil!

  Sartre was wrong.

  It’s not our people

  but your cloudy-self

  falling in big dark chunks

  like a long beard sheared.

  Abaddon a blank page

  for scribbling staches

  till the whole space is black

  with a few gaps. Rabbi L. Cohen said,

  There’s a crack in everything

  even in my Hitler moustache

  that’s how the light gets thin.

  Song for a Colonoscopy

  A bird’s name spoken in pain.

  Turn me to a medieval futurist, an ascetic astronaut.

  I fast and suck something like Tang, flavour of vomited Creamsicle or chug gallons of turned ginger ale.

  Drink, Alchemist, you say, till shit metamorphoses to the rivers of …

  space for your watchful eye inside me.

  Intimate Stranger.

  IBD is an insidious anti-Semitic-modern-American-diasporic-chronic-condition.

  I fear it like my ancestors feared the czar.

  I cannot flee.

  The Cossacks are not coming for me—

  just you, Cold Tube.

  My colon gleams pink like dentist office gums.

  I fast one year in three.

  One day, I will time it for Yom Kippur,

  arrive in Shul, first time in my life, atoned

  & soiled.

  God is propofol.

  My people’s history to the anesthetist.

  After, I stroll down the street leaking gas like it’s my birthright.

  Just off the boat from that old country

  as far away as health—

  like I’ve come to America from Austria-Hungary in 1921.

  I’m alive, which is not the same thing as being home.

  The Spaz

  My back spasm, guarding against pain with

  more pain, reminds of my mother’s small fists

  whiffling my adolescent chest. The spectacle

  hurt most. Behind my back, my friends

  called her The Spaz or did until the overdose.

  By then the tumours had spread everywhere

  like gossip. The spastic pain shoots through

  the front sometimes. My mother survived

  her attempts. As usual, her violence was

  too gentle or she was too weak to keep

  failing. I could barely lift the shovel. Dirt

  pattered the casket like the sound

  of someone trying to keep their voice down.

  My friends who thought I was out

  of earshot when they called her The Spaz,

  I hoped, felt like assholes then. I remain unsure

  if anyone is accountable for anything

  entirely. The hurt, I’m certain, is non-

  negotiable. I believe my mother would

  be proud of me for how I’m lowering

  myself now into a warm bath. It won’t resolve

  the spasm, but the pain turns less worse.

  To a Child Whose Mother Has Not Yet Died

  I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

  — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  In a theme park that’s now a Walmart,

  holding your mother’s hand, a balloon fell up

  from your palm. You watched the strange red ball

  lose its dimension, blemish the sun, then gone

  and felt it hadn’t left, but made you small

  and less. It wasn’t your fault

  entirely. A bird gliding the still lake

  like it were frozen in May, distracted.

  You were trying to decide: a mallard

  or garbage—a mangled paper crane,

  folded by neglect, made you forget

  to hold the balloon’s string tight.

  Inventor of tears, you were the first

  to experience loss. As though the rivers

  of Babylon, you wept by a concrete pond.

  This, your first lesson in letting go

  or you learned the exact opposite

  or life has nothing to teach us. You taught it

  with your grief, which an older self

  regards now as trivial. Wise as the day

  you were born, your cry like a balloon

  vanished to sky, existing all the same.

  And what was your mother teaching

  this unwise life when she ran

  to buy you another balloon.

  This one was blue. Given the circumstances,

  an unacceptable replacement. Surely,

  if you could go back there,

  so much less wise with your years,

  you would have accepted the blue balloon.

  You would tell your mother, she did the best

  she could. But you’re wrong—

  the replacement balloon was not blue

  but the same red. No, not the same.

  Not the very same. That’s why you refused.

  And to ensure life not misconstrue the message,

  when she bought you ice cream, you threw

  the waffle cone down and stomped it to the ground.

  Song to the Suicides

  Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.

  — George Sanders

  Whose reasons were reruns of rainy days.

  All that grey. The disappointments too small

  to count for much had started adding up.

  And for a while we ask why and why

  but soon turn to the song of not yourself.

  You were not well, we sing. Should have been

  on meds or if you were, then newer ones. Re-

  uptake of x or y was too slow, we read. We know

  enough to bury our fear: you thought it through

  and said, Thanks, but I’d prefer not. Less theist

  than Zen, you lived fully in the moment

  of your pasts. And to the wisdom of our age

  offered every minor Job: Hey that’s life,

  my friend, it cannot be said, you disagreed.

  Note

  After we met I emailed you and asked if you wanted to have coffee with me and give me advice about finding an apartment in New York since you had recently moved there but you never responded because I think you assumed the apartment thing was just an excuse to see you again and this annoyed me because I thought it was presumptuous and it also annoyed me because it was mostly true. About a month later I messaged you a poem I had written which was about the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s because we had talked about it that time we met and you said you liked it. I was trying to impress you I guess like maybe I am not as beautiful as you but I can do this. I was pretty happy when you wrote back and said you liked the poem and then I asked you if you wanted to have coffee with me since we both lived in New York now and you didn’t respond and then I moved to Greenpoint and A— told me you lived there too and so I texted you and said hey we live in the same neighbourhood now so we should have coffee and you asked me if I was close to Manhattan Avenue and Clay Street and I google-mapped it and saw it was like a half hour walk from me but lied and said yes I’m right around there since I didn’t think you would meet me somewhere halfway. Halfway just didn’t seem like your style. It was a really hot d
ay and I sweated a lot as I walked towards Champion Coffee on Manhattan Ave and you were late. I wondered if you were standing me up. I was sitting there really disliking you when you walked through the door like it was the entrance to a movie set. You took off your sunglasses and your eyes were amazingly dark and you seemed precisely aware of just how beautiful you looked and it was very difficult to not like you again. After a few minutes in Champion Coffee you found it too hot or too loud or too something and said we should hang out at your place and we sat on your couch and I kept thinking I should kiss you I should just lean over and kiss you when you come back from the bathroom when you come back from the kitchen with coffee when you come back from the kitchen with water when you come back from the kitchen with wine I should kiss you. I must have sat on that couch for close to two hours and I don’t remember now what we talked about except you told me a story about how this guy invited you to his place to record a song but then just wanted to sleep with you and I wondered if you were telling me the story as a way of saying I better not try to kiss you or anything because you were tired of men pretending they wanted something other than your body when that was all they really wanted (I don’t know how that feels). Then you said you had to be somewhere and I was glad that I no longer had to worry about whether I should kiss you or not and left and then not too long after that I got involved with someone and then someone else and again someone else. It was that kind of year for me I guess but still I thought of you once in a while. And then I didn’t see you for about a year but then A— and R— came to New York and we all hung out in Williamsburg and you were talking about how you never pay for your drinks anywhere you go because men always buy them for you and then I got up to go to the bar and told you I wasn’t buying you a drink and you laughed and I said seriously I am not buying you a drink and I think those were the last words I ever said to you and that was four years ago. Everything I know about you now comes from the New York Daily News. It says you didn’t leave a note and it says we were the same age which I didn’t know and there is a picture not of you but of the window you smashed on the 24th floor with what witnesses described as a wooden object possibly a chair and it is so difficult to imagine you doing any of these things the paper said you did since you were always so composed and careful about your appearance like you anticipated that at any moment you would be photographed.

  Metamorphosis

  Velocity, an excuse

  for the way water betrays.

  Your leap embraced

  with hard indifference

  as though when you fell

  you froze the sea.

  Jumbo Elegy

  Paralysed force, gesture without motion

  — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

  The cement elephant plays chicken

  with a train, forever up ahead. With painted eyes

  he stares down the ghost

  of that locomotive. Makes it vanish.

  The town’s barren tracks like casket handles

  holding nothing’s ceaseless progress. Jumbo,

  the world’s most beloved behemoth,

  still as a golem. Insides stuffed

  with sky. Real hide

  on the Upper West Side. Tusks

  at Tufts U. Heart

  left in Ithaca. His likeness

  watches like a sentinel

  over the Giant Tiger,

  Walmart, Canadian Tire,

  the forensic psych hospital,

  two methadone clinics, three Timmies,

  and the charred remains

  of a schoolhouse photographed by Google

  the day it burned, turned

  to a virtual eternal flame.

  Some say Jumbo was a martyr,

  charged the train to save young Tom Thumb.

  But Fred says suicide,

  and he’s not the only one. Sally

  will just let you know

  what everyone knows, but won’t say.

  Jumbo was worth more dead.

  It was convenient, is all,

  when you consider Barnum

  knew a lot of taxidermists. George reports

  the tusks pushed up like daisies

  through Jumbo’s brain. Candice claims

  the train had the effect of a good poem.

  Took his head right off,

  so, it rolled like a deposed despot

  from a guillotine. This, his gift

  to the good citizens of St. Thomas,

  in place of what’s been lost:

  the trains, the Sterling Truck plant

  and Ford factory, the jobs and the jobs

  and the jobs. There are no angels

  in Ontario, says the once great slave,

  only a beast paralyzed, waiting

  for the 8:20 to London,

  arriving any minute now.

  God as We Understood Him

  In the summer of your recovery

  we hid from the boozy breeze

  in blanket forts, blasted by AC.

  Carnivals were literal then.

  We ate so many slushies,

  we were almost happy.

  In the fake horse race, I won

  a stuffed animal you named

  Žižek the Giraffe, declaring

  he must always be referred to

  by the title bestowed.

  You were determined

  to hold not letting go

  of our silly shells, entirely.

  All August, the inside jokes

  fell somewhere other

  than between us, lost

  in our manageable lives.

  We had to believe

  what we didn’t. God is

  dark matter, the uncertainty

  principle. He is all

  things I thought

  necessary but not

  sufficient. I’m unsure

  I believed any of it

  or pretended for you

  and which of these

  possibilities is love

  as I understand it.

  In the fall of your relapse

  I admitted to myself

  and no one else, I miss

  what I once misunderstood.

  After, as silly as this sounds,

  Žižek the Giraffe began

  to scare me. His gaze turned

  sinister. Glued-eyes wide

  and unrecognizing as God’s.

  On Missing a Train Stop

  I had fallen asleep

  I said, and he asked

  Late night? and I nodded

  It happens, he said.

  I told him I’d be late

  to read some poems

  in Cobourg. Isn’t this

  the kind of thing

  you’d expect from a poet?

  He shrugged. I could

  get off in Belleville and take

  the train back

  the way I came

  he said and I wondered

  if he understood much

  about poetry. But he understood

  what mattered: I hadn’t kept

  my appointment. I looked out

  as the lake drew close

  and seemed made

  from the manes of horses

  and then receded

  from the window

  as quick as life might actually

  pass. I had lied. I wasn’t

  asleep back there but lost

  in the furthest hedge

  in my head, where

  the beast’s grunts are near

  enough, the maples shake.

  As though the creature’s breath

  were a light breeze.

  I wa
s thinking, of course

  about a woman.

  How I might ask her

  to live with me and how

  she would say no,

  how she would always say

  no, though all would be fine

  with us, if she would just

  not fear my love so much,

  which not to be too grandiose

  is a bit like God’s love

  for the Israelites. Jealous,

  yes, but full of promise

  and about as endless.

  And I stood

  on the platform in Belleville

  and wondered what to tell you

  about today, though it doesn’t matter

  now. Still, I want you to know

  the boxcars were splashed

  an acrylic burgundy

  and seemed soft as mud

  under a sharp sun

  which looked warm,

  but wasn’t. And the sky,

  for what it’s worth,

  an impossible blue.

  Songs from an Emergency Room

  My birthdate tells the time.

  The hours took my origins.

  A mannequin models my name,

  clipped to my wrist. I can’t read

  last year’s Newsweek. All text,

  a Rorschach test. The news feed

  has gone quiet, but for friends

  abroad. The Parisian sky

  is iodine. I no longer know

  how to decipher light. I live

  inside an HD TV dream home

  on the wall. This is the house,

  they say, we want to stay forever.

  The handsome brothers promise,

  this is what they do: We make dreams—

  Code Blue, repeats a disembodied

  elegy. That poor soul, I think—

  will keep me here an eternity.

  My humanity grows impatient.

  Hell is sicker people. Waiting,

  they say, sets you free. Resuscitate

  the tiles. Resurrect the den.

  The emergency room is ready

  to be a nursery. Forever—

  their last words as the glass gates

  slid behind me. I’m angelic

  beneath the radiating halo.

  In my veins fluids rain